October 2014 – Nalates’ Things & Stuff

Second Life Performance Boost

2014/10/31 by Nalates Urriah

Market Place

Yesterday about lunch time the Lindens posted a blog article titled Performance, Performance, Performance. The surprising part, at least to me, is the performance improvements made to the Market Place. I’ve been covering the coming change to Viewer Managed Market Place. But, I don’t recall hearing about Market Place (MP) performance improvements.

Whatever, the Lindens say they are seeing a 70% faster response time and pages load 30% faster.

Builder's Brewery Materials Class — Builder’s Brewery Materials Class

Group Chat

I’ve been sort of covering the improvements to group chat. News in this area is almost always after the fact. The Lindens have realized that whenever they say anything about changing something they get complaints about how the change is the cause of whatever problem users are having. So, they think they get better feedback on some things if they change and listen before saying anything.

This last week we have been running on new code in the chat servers. The metrics say things are MUCH better. I know I haven’t got a ‘cannot connect’ error when trying to comment in group chat this past week. But, I have also been busy and not in world much either.

Second Life Inventory & Performance

2014/10/30 by Nalates Urriah

Over on SLUniverse the question was asked about whether large inventories degrade viewer performance and cause region crossing problems.

Oct 2014 - Testing Alchemy Viewer — Oct 2014 – Testing Alchemy Viewer

Trinity Dejavu give a pretty good explanation of how inventory size affects viewer performance here. I think basic information needed for understanding inventory was skipped over and a couple of points could have been more accurate. So, I added my 3 cents worth and I’ll post it here too.

To understand inventory one needs a basic idea of how assets, the stuff in your inventory and the regions, are handled by the Second Life™ system. I’ll keep it lite.

Everything in SL is a collection of vertices and textures/images. Primitives, cubes, spheres, etc., are just some numbers; type, size, rotation, and position. The lists of vertices for primitives are built into the viewer, so no downloads beyond the parameter values. So too the avatar is built in. All that is ever downloaded for primitives and the avatars is a list of numbers, parameters. For the avatar we call the values collection: Shape.

Trying Out Alchemy – Second Life

2014/10/292014/10/29 by Nalates Urriah

Alchemy Viewer Logo

Download size is 42mb that uses 159mb of disk when installed. The install was error free. Recently I get errors with the Linden installs. Some times a retry fixes it. Others times I have to ignore to continue. The Crash Logger seems to be the problem with the install. I am almost always installing just after running the viewer. The Linden Viewers still seem to work OK in spite of the errors. But, it is reassuring to not have errors.

The install places the viewer in C:\Program Files\AlchemyBeta.

The cache installs in C:\Users\[Win_login_ID]\AppData\Local\Alchemy64. You can set that to be any location you want. I usually move it off my C drive for better performance. Windows uses my C drive for its swapping and temp files. Moving it saves the viewer having to compete for hard drive bandwidth.

It seems the cache for the 32 and 64 bit version are different. I’m not sure why they would do that.

The logs are installed in C:\Users\[Win_login_ID]\AppData\Roaming\Alchemy. So, it seems the 32 bit and 64 bit version use the same logs and chat files. There is a setting that will allow you to place the chat logs wherever you want.

Alchemy Viewer Beta 3.7.19 – Second Life

2014/10/29 by Nalates Urriah

Alchemy Viewer Logo

The Alchemy Viewer team has released a new beta version of their viewer. I have yet to try it. But Inara has written up a good review. See: Alchemy 3.7.19: mainlining HTTP and enhancing legacy search.

The viewer’s page announcing the release is here: Alchemy Beta 3.7.19.

It appears we get a search feature in this version that has a new User Interface (UI). The change will change how you use search. It sounds much more efficient. Still, it depends on the SL Search Engine, so I doubt the hit accuracy has improved. That will take some work on the Linden server side to improve. But, this new UI should be nice to use.

The Camera Control gets compressed. But, this is just the standard camera control, not photo tools, which is why I often use Firestorm.

The World Map gets a revamp. They make more efficient use of screen space, or read as removing white-space from the controls. The panel looks busier now. I’ll have to try it before I can decide if it is better or just different.

Drax Radio Hour Show 42

2014/10/29 by Nalates Urriah

Drax and Jo have episode 42 of their Radio Hour out. Ciaran has a review of the podcast out. Seems the uninformed media is again voicing ignorant opinions about Second Life™. Only a small part of Ciaran’s discussion is devoted to the journalistic stupidity. The rest is pointing out what’s in the Drax/Jo episode. He … Read more

Second Life News & Bits 2014-44

2014/10/28 by Nalates Urriah

Viewer

According to Oz Linden we will see the Benchmark Viewer get promoted to the main default version this week, may be tomorrow, Wednesday. This is the viewer that does away with the GPU Table.

This viewer is still being tuned to give reliable graphics settings. The one currently in the Alternate viewer page just got some updates. I’m not sure when the ‘just’ is. I suspect last Friday.

On another note about viewers… the Max Bandwidth setting is becoming less important as more of the Second Life™ data moves via pipeline in HTTP. The Max Bandwidth is a setting that controls UDP protocol traffic ONLY. With more and more traffic moving to HTTP the UDP congestion is less and less. See JIRA VWR-29029 for the old problem of setting Max Bandwidth too high.