Second Life News 2014-6

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MeshUseHttpRetryAfter

This is another new Debug Setting; MeshUseHttpRetryAfter. The purpose of this setting is to have the viewer retry downloads after they fail. Actually viewer is going to retry no matter what. But this setting changes when the viewer retries.

The SL Servers are being changed to provide Retry – After 503 response headers. When the server is having trouble keeping up it can send a 503 response that tells the client to wait certain amount of time before trying again. How well this works depends on numerous factors. Your computer, your router and gateway, your Internet connection, the SL network, and region servers all contribute to how well this does or doesn’t work.

Having the value of the settings set to true hasn’t behave as the Lindens think will be best. There are scenarios where having set to false may provide a better result. If you find that setting it to false gives you better performance, file a JIRA Bug Report and described your set up a network connection.

BUGS

this RC Viewer is not a perfect viewer. The Release Notes show nine known bugs remaining. But, for those experiencing connection problems to Second Life this viewer could be a big improvement.

Second Life Google Breakpad Viewer version 3.6.14.285686

This RC Viewer is new in the list this week. We see the Breakpad RC Viewer coming go from the list. This week it is back. This is the viewer that provide better information back to the Lab when the viewer crashes.

This RC Viewer comes and goes as the Lindens try to figure out how to get accurate information from a program that’s crashing. It’s not an easy thing to do. Imagine trying to write down every detail of what’s happening as you have a car wreck.

Project Viewers

We now have two project viewers.

Second Life Project Sunshine Viewer version 3.6.14.285190 – The fixes listed are:

  • Stability and performance improvements for SSA: retry logic, removing redundant requests, detecting various appearance stuck conditions.
  • Code cleanup – removed a lot of code related to the old client-side baking framework.
  • Bug fixes, mostly appearance-related.
  • Support for AISv3. This is a not-yet-deployed set of improvements for inventory support; once it goes live on the server side, the changes in this viewer release will enable integration with it. The functions we are initially implementing in AISv3 are mostly related to improving the reliability of outfit changes, so the speed should improve and the failure rate should drop even further once both the viewer and server components have been released.

When you hear people talking about AISv3 they are talking about the changes going in to the Sunshine Viewer.

Second Life Project Merchant Outbox Viewer version 3.6.13.284731 – The fixes are:

  • Merchant Outbox viewer crashes on Exit on Windows 7
  • User needs to click OK twice to dismiss Merchant Outbox notification
  • Merchant Outbox Initialization fails with 404 error with new account in Merchant Outbox viewer
  • Merchant Outbox panel unusable and unrecoverable if outbox folder disappears
  • Send to Marketplace from Merchant Outbox says it fails when it doesn’t
  • Merchant outbox with genuine failure “409 conflict” causes all further imports to fail
  • Merchant outbox: Second Life 3.6.8 (282375) build – results when user has a merchant outbox misplaced in inventory.
  • Viewer crash when deleting trash which contains Merchant Outbox

Summary

On the viewer side of things we seem to be getting a lot of new stuff. What may not be readily apparent is that a number of these changes also have server-side components. So, it may be that we seeing a slow pace and server development because releases are waiting on viewers to be released. Once the viewer side of changes are out the Lab can collect more data and know whether they’ve got it and can proceed or whether they have problem in need to make changes. Or maybe I’m completely wrong…

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2 thoughts on “Second Life News 2014-6”

  1. The Cool VL Viewer has been implementing the new mesh fetching code for a few weeks now (i.e. I backported it as soon as LL made the code public), and it works beautifully !

    Note that the crazy increases in former mesh mesh concurrency setting by some (many ?) users was due to bugs in the mesh repository code, namely lack of proper locking (the mesh repository runs as a thread, and if both that thread and the main thread modify the same data because of a missing lock, that data becomes inconsistent). This problem sometimes made the mesh fetching queue stall (it got stuck with pending downloads, filling up HTTP connection slots and keeping them \locked\ forever); the only work-around was then to increases the mesh concurrency to gain more free slots and resume mesh data downloads.

    I had one such missing lock fixed in the Cool VL Viewer, but the new fetcher caught two more missing locks, fixing the mesh repository for good (so the benefit of the new fetcher is not just about using less HTTP connections, but also about fixing what was *very* buggy code).

    As for the old (v1) mesh fetching capability, it is essential to keep for OpenSim compatibility (at least till OpenSim folks updates their server software to cope with the new protocol).

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