You may or may not have noticed the Lindens are talking more about what is happening behind the scenes in Second Life. See: Tale of the Missing ACK.
The article is a good example of the troubleshooting often needed to find a problem.
Linden Fix It
Second Life
Things about SL
Server Update #2 Week 7
Thursday we had a surprise roll out to the RC channels of the main grid. The package was a fix for a security exploit. Friday early in the morning the update rolled to the main channel of the grid.
So, what was going on? The details were published by April Linden 2016-02-19 11:18 AM in the SL Forum/Blog. See: Why the Friday Grid Roll?
This exploit was in part of Linux system software. The Linux developers made the patch. The Lindens had to figure out what it would do to the Second Life(TM) system. Was it needed? Yes, crackers could exploit SL. Would the patch break anything in the SL system? Nobody knew. They had to find out. So, the Lindens put a lot of effort into getting this exploit resolved.
Server Update Week 7
We were not expecting any updates this week. But, we got one. The RC channels have been updated in a surprise roll out. We will likely see the package roll to the main grid as soon as the Lindens are confident the software is working well.
This departure from schedule is due to a security exploit.
As of now the Lindens are not talking about the exploit. But, they seldom do. We might hear a bit after it rolls to the main channel. But, I won’t be holding my breath.
Second Life News Week 07
Servers
As expected, there are no server updates this week, probably next week. My home region has not been restarted since 2/2/2016, two full weeks. The region seems to be working OK. The server stats shown in the Viewer Statistics Panel all look good.
Viewers
Not much visibly happening with viewers. But, we may see a viewer promoted this week.
- Second Life HTTP update Viewer version 4.0.2.310660
- Second Life Maintenance Viewer version 4.0.2.310545
- Second Life Quick Graphics Viewer version 4.0.2.310127
- Second Life Project Bento Viewer version 5.0.0.310099
- Second Life Project Oculus Rift Viewer version 3.7.18.295296
- Second Life Obsolete Platforms Viewer version 3.7.28.300847 :/
I’ve been using the Linden, Firestorm, and Catznip (R10) viewers recently. I have less problems and better performance with Catznip. That is not a test result. I haven’t done organized testing. But, my subjective experience is Catznip is behaving better right now.
I do see texture thrashing when using Catznip… less of that with Firestorm. It takes some time to get there, generally over an hour for me.
Firestorm Team Thank You
Jessica Lyon has posted on the Firestorm Viewer blog a thank you to the SL community. They have been raising funds mostly to pay for the Kakadu license.
Kakadu used to get lots of coverage in the SL blogosphere. Not so much anymore. Kakadu is the software Linden Lab and Firestorm developers license to handle compression and decompression of images.
You may not know that Linden Lab stores all images/textures in JPEG2000 format. The format offers the advantage of faster and smaller downloads and larger and slower downloads by having different resolution images efficiently stored in one image file. While the format is an ISO standard, the process of getting an image into and out of JPEG2000 format is proprietary. There are open source libraries developers can use to make and use JPEG2000 format files. They aren’t the same as Kakadu.
Second Life: Third Party Developers’ Meeting 2-12-16
This meeting ran a little over 20 minutes. It was mostly status updates.
RC Second Life HTTP update Viewer version 4.0.2.310660 – This version has the HTTP, Co-routines, and Vivox updates. The HTTP updates were driving up the crash rate so in this version they are disabled.