Second Life News 2017 w15

Servers

This week there is no planned roll of the main channel servers.

Destination: Gates of Melancholy

Destination: Gates of Melancholy

The RC channels are getting a new package and will roll on Wednesday. According to the ‘deploys’ thread they all get the same package. This package includes:

  • Several internal fixes and two new internal logging modes
  • Another adjustment to fix issues with offline IM and Group Notice delivery reliability
  • Fixes an issue where large numbers of objects could be returned after a rolling restart

My understanding was the change for Estate Owner and Manager control of parcel access in a region was to be in this release but, I see no mention of it. Last week Oz, Grumpity, Caleb, and Mazidox Linden were all talking about it. 

I suppose since the viewer side part is not yet out, Mazidox Linden may have omitted its mention or it may not have been released. Either way it would be unusable until a viewer supports the feature. I just find it odd that the feature being talked about arriving this week, more than any other feature, isn’t mentioned.

Viewers

The main viewer is version 5.0.3.324435, the same as last week and the week before. This is the version that fixes snapshot-via-email. That change is propagating through the third party viewers that got bitten by that bug.

Second Life AssetHttp Viewer version 5.0.4.325144 – This week this version has been promoted to ‘RC’ status from ‘Project’. Otherwise the same. This is the version that pulls more assets from the CDN system that previously came from the asset servers. We should see things like gestures, sounds, and animations delivered faster.

Second Life Maintenance Viewer version 5.0.4.325124 – This is the same version as last week, no change.

Second Life Project 360 Snapshot Viewer version 4.1.3.321712 – Still on hold. Waiting for Alex Ivy to complete.

Second Life Project Alex Ivy Viewer version 5.1.0.503537 – No change from last week.

Second Life Voice Viewer version 5.0.4.324770 – This version disappeared. Looking around I don’t see any information about what happened. Poof.

The Alex Ivy 64-bit viewer could use more users. It is only the RC versions that get users automatically assigned from those that select Willing to run RC. Project viewers require a manual download. When I use a Linden made viewer, I tend to use Alex Ivy. It has advantages. I think it is faster and suffers less texture thrashing (clear, blurry, clear…).

The AssetHTTP viewer may be interesting. I do expect it to eventually render scenes faster. But, I doubt it will fix the partially rendered head problem that is so spooky.

I wonder if the few that test this version won’t find initial use slower than other viewers… the CDN caches have to be filled. I see a number of articles for services that crawl sites to force caches to load before the big search engines get there. The idea is to produce a fast load time for the big engines and thus improve you page ranking in searches. But, this seems to point to nature of the CDN’s to NOT preload their caches.

So, it seems the commercial CDN systems only load an item when someone wants it. If you are the first requester, you have to wait while the CDN system loads it then your computer downloads their copy. While their copy remains in their cache all subsequent users have a better experience. But, how long do they keep stuff in their caches? That isn’t information they hype. So, I haven’t found good information.

The real improvement in performance is in what we do with our local caches. Anything we can pull from a local cache is way faster than anything we can pull from the net, CDN or not. So, a bigger local cache is better.

Catznip Viewer

A new release of Catznip is coming. Inara has a good review of new features it will have. See: Catznip R12: a peek at upcoming inventory management improvements.

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