Group Loading Problems
Group membership list loading delays cause some group chat problems/failures. To fix chat, currently an interim fix that prevents large groups from downloading a full list of members is in place server side. An incomplete list is a problem, especially if the owner/manager names didn’t download. But, the Lindens deem the chat problems as worse than an incomplete member list.
The chat problem is a cascading problem, meaning once it starts more and more problems are created. Fixing all the issues in the cascade is lots of work as is changing how the lists download. The quick fix work-around is to prevent spending too much time downloading large member lists. So, we have to deal with the incomplete list problems which affects fewer people than the chat problems.
Eventually this will get fixed. But, it is going to take some time. I’m thinking this year…
FabFree Gacha Yard Sale – All Items Under 50L! by Love Trill, on Flickr
Pedophile
Pedophiles are a problem and especially so in Second Life and online games. Last Friday the subject came up in the Third Party Dev’s meeting. It seems the group ban is just not being effective. One of the groups is having problems with a brazen and highly persistent pedophile.
It looks like the answer is to contact Linden Lab legal as well as support.
A Bug
Bug-8616 – Rigged mesh avatars created using the “cube trick” deform when detaching any rigged mesh attachments – only reproduces on post attachment-fix viewers.
Forum discussion of 8616. It has a description of the ‘cube-trick’ and a work-around for this work-around trick.
Clear Your Cache
Clearing the viewer’s cache is a very very last resort for fixing a problem. With today’s viewers and the new HTTP protocols in place a corrupt cache is rare. Now a cache clear is much more likely to aggravate problems than fix them.
So why is support telling users to clear cache to fix Linden Homes when the home’s controls stop working? The fix for that problem is to restart the region. The answer is the Lab is lagging in communicating with and training support people.
Oz tells us engineering has a weekly meeting with support. I suspect that is a meeting with department heads. It seems impractical to me to pull all the support people off the phones for a meeting. I also doubt all the support people work in the Lab’s offices. So, communication is going to be a problem. There are always going to be employees that don’t read the memos…
Deflating Inventory
This ‘deflate’ thing is about having too many items in a single folder. Somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000 items in a folder, depending on the computer and connection, a user cannot login.
One has to call support, they can fix the problem with a tool engineering made for them.
The viewer fetches the contents of the Inventory Root Folder. Then it iterates through the folders it found in the root. Then repeats with the newly found folders and so on.
While the server is bundling and transmitting the inventory list and the viewer is handling the incoming list the viewer is not sending any I’m still here messages to the server. If that process lasts too long the server thinks you have poof’d for whatever reason and starts logging you out.
The utility tool support runs to fix the problem and deflate your inventory doesn’t change anything in inventory, other than create folder items and place your existing items in them. So, losing items is not a possibility. If you work with SQL commands, think ‘replace’ command, where only a field in a targeted set of records is changed.
Cleanup Calling Cards
There is work moving forward to automatically clean up calling cards. I think this is mostly to remove duplicates.
If you don’t use Calling Cards you can get a little performance boost by deleting them. If you want to know how they can be used, find one of the Firestorm classes on Calling Cards and attend.
iCloud Problem are Back…
iCloud is crashing viewers again. Like Skydrive did. This problem was originally encountered September 2014.
The Apple file picker is a problem this time around. See BUG-7343 – iCloud update causes broken mesh upload, “error encoding snapshot” saving snapshots to inventory, “Couldn’t convert the image to jpeg2000” uploading textures and broken UI colours.
Uploading an image/texture and using the file section panel with iCloud installed causes a fail.
Also, uploading using ‘Lossless’ is being a problem as it distorts and degrades images.
re. avatar at 0,0 – there seems to be several related issues causing this, or at least we see it for different reasons. The most effective solution is to cam to where the avatar *should be* seated. Never fails to snap the avatar off 0,0 for me.
Time is also likely to be a factor.
This happens all the time, some sims will never rez.
Latest today, 10.00 am CEST, at SL12B. The sim with the landing point was okey, it was realy fast but when I xed next simxing it was all grey.
Some areas is slower the others sutch as, Second Norway and areas around Fishermans Island. The midpart of Blake sea is okey until I reach the old parts in west.
My computer and internet are more than capable to manage SL.
I use Mc OS 10.10.3 on an iMac and Alchemy version 3.8.0.35816 and Second Life version 3.7.29.301305.
I found another mystery that might be linked. A couple of times the viewers wont start at all. It´s only a white screen. The solution to that problem is to trow the whola cache-folder, folder and content in trash. Then the viewer start as normal again. Both viewers affected. It looks like the Cache-folder itself gets corupt. Empty the folder doesnt help
CDN adds a new level of fast and slow. If you are the first in your RL area into a region, you will load slower than in the past. If bunches of people in your RL area have been there, you should be much faster.
Your Mac no-start problem I have not seen or heard of. Save your log files after a no-start failure and send them to the Lab in a BUG report.
The disappearing avatar issue can sometimes be solved by setting draw distance to zero, panning the cam out as far as possible then hitting escape. Reset the draw distance and things return to normal.
Thanks.