Second Life Server Tidbits

I missed the Simulator User Group meeting. But, I just saw the meeting minutes got posted. There are a few interesting things that came up in the meeting.

TimeWarp

This is the Linden name for the problem of simulators stalling for 30 to 60 seconds, which knocks people in the simulators’ regions offline. Since the operating system kernel upgrades on the ADITI grid that problem has disappeared.

This week, Oct 3 to 7, The Lab will be upgrading the kernel on all the servers running simulators. If I understood correctly, that upgrade will also be applied to many of the support services servers. This means the week will see lots of region restarts. See: Critical OS Software Upgrade — Region Restarts

Regions will see at least 2 restarts and if unlucky 3.

Uptime

In the main and release channels regions are restarted once per week. However, on the preview gris uptime can be long. Andrew Linden checked the numbers for a group of ADITI simulators and found uptime to be 519 days.

The common uptimes on ADITI are 519, 375, and 192 days.

Mono Scripts

It seems the Mono Scripts thing that can be built into the Linux OS or added to an application. SL runs on the Application style Mono version 2.6.7. Kelly Linden says system Mono is not used to compile SL scripts.

Thread Rez and Derez

Threaded rez of objects was added to SL some time ago. There is ongoing work to add threaded derez, according to Simon Linden. Kelly says as far as he knows it is not on the schedule.

There is some speculation around 16:30 in the minutes as to whether threaded derez would help much and what problems it would solve.

SVC-4196Avatar entering sim or rezzing object causes sim to freeze for up to 30 seconds. The fix for this JIRA was in part adding threaded rez. Thus mostly fixing the entering a region problem. The leaving a region side of the problem would be the derez thing.

Simon says, he really did say…, creating side threads in the SL system is complex because of the intertwined nature of the system. So, we are unlikely to see derez given a threaded nature any time soon.

Those that monitor region performance with tracking software can still see the problem. In regions with large AV populations user may still see 5 second mini-freezes when heavy AV’s come in or leave. I believe heavy in this case means lots of scripts.

Viewer Stats

The entry for Spare Time on a region was removed from Viewer 2. It was just a UI change. So, a change to the XML file can restore it. We can expect it to get added back to the SLViewer 3.

llSetKeyframedAnimation

The name of the LSL function is probably going to be changed before it is rolled to the main grid. The name is causing too much confusion. The probable name is: llSetKeyframedMotion.

Falcon Linden says llSetKeyframedAnimation uses infinite acceleration, but constant velocity.

Anyone right clicking an object using llSetKeyframedAnimation will freeze. That may not get fixed before roll out.

Havok 2011.2

Falcon says SL is getting the Havok 2011.2 physics engine. It’s already out on some ADITI regions including Ahern and Chief. Falcon is going to try and get Kapor and Rosedale running on the new Havok.

llGiveMoney

There are some long time problems with llGiveMoney() failing. Andrew is looking into understanding the problem to see if a fix is possible.

Summary

These bits expand on Second Life Server News Week 39 information.

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