Life is busy for me. New work, new lovers… not much time in the SL world.
Servers
We got a roll to the RC channels this week. None to the main channel.
The RC package is described on the forum in Deploy for Week 1/19. This is a bug fix and new feature package. BUG-8223 is a picture upload issue that most of us have never seen. The new feature is the new HOVER feature that adjust avatar height in relation to the ground and objects sat on.
There was a web page explaining how to use the feature. But, the wiki fixes seem to have rolled the wiki back a couple of weeks and the page disappeared. Also, the release notes for this package are gone too. So, we are kinda on our own.
Inara Pey has been chasing down the links and experimenting with the new feature. Check her blog for more information. I’m not going to have time to do any experimenting for a few days.
Oddball
Whore Coulture – https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/BUG-8255? If you have seen this, the story is in the JIRA.
Wiki
The SL Wiki is now editable, but as I said earlier it seems to have rolled back to first week of January. This has the alternate viewers downloads, release notes, and various other links messed up. Plus lots of recent stuff the Lindens have added is missing. I expect that to clean up in the couple of weeks.
The wiki was being vandalized and was locked down to stop the vandalism. It seems the software has been updated and, hopefully, the exploit plugged. So, for now editing by users is open again.
The new Avatar Height/Hover page that was in the wiki is gone. Caleb Linden says he can get it back. So, expect it to reappear soon.
Content Delivery Network
CDN – there are stories about people finding cold caches on the current CDN, which is not supposed to happen. A cache goes cold when it is emptied. In the case of a viewer it is when you have cleared your cache or the files in it have gone out of date.
For the user this means they have to wait while the CDN service downloads the content and loads the cache. Only then can you get the download to their computer. It is slow. Slower than no CDN cache. But, once the cache is loaded (hot) using CDN is way faster. So, the first requester suffers and the subsequent requesters get faster downloads.
Rumor is that other CDN providers are being tested. It may be that more than one CDN provider will be used in the final setup.
I would not be surprised to find that CDN providers are surprised by the load that Second Life places on their service. Nor would it surprise me that they are NOT ready for the volume of data they are asked to host. We already ran into that problem once. So, this may remain a problem while the CDN industry figures things out.
The idea of using CDN started when Server Side Appearance (SSA) was implemented. It worked very well for that task. We were only placing a demand of a few million files to be cached and those files were used frequently.
With regions we are needing millions and possibly billions of files to be cached. Some of those regions do not see a lot of traffic, so CDN demand is low and infrequent. So, it would be part of the CDN caching system to dump those seldom used files in favor of housing the more commonly used files, thus saving disk space. But, that REALLY hurts performance in SL.