Server

As with the Sim User Group, things are a bit mundane right now. That are a few interesting things that came up in the user meeting.

Two second lags… some people are seeing short lags where the viewer sort of freezes up. One fix that has been suggested is to change the Debug Settings value for curlUseMultipleThreads. Because of some crash issues the default value is FALSE. Some say changing this to TRUE solved the mini freeze/lag problem. Try it at your own risk.

Curl typically requires a connection for each thread, afaik. So, setting curlUseMultipleThreads true may increase your number of connections. Some user modems can only handle a limited number of NAT connections. One can try to reduce the maximum number HTTP Texture Get connections to offset the cURL increase.

One of the changes rolled to the main grid was the ability for regions to detect users with Premium Accounts. That is needed for the new enhancements to premium membership. Oskar hints that other benefits than just the two announced for premium membership are coming.

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Not a lot is happening in sim development right now, well … that is exciting anyway. The work of fixing bugs and tweaking performance continues and keeps Lindens busy. There are a few interesting tidbits.

The Morris region in ADITI got a new version of the LSL Optimization Project last week, week 35. Scripts should run faster there. Andrew is looking for any data people may gain experimenting with scripts there.

Andrew Linden is looking at the Lab’s auto-build service and considering how to move server development over to it and VS2010. There are advantages to using VS2010. I’m not doing any serious software application development, so I have no idea why it is better, other than the general newer is better thing.

But, there are several compile issues that will be improved by moving the server development over to the auto-build process. Things like using newer libraries and upgrading the server’s OS kernel are dependent on moving to auto-build. So, the move to VS2010 may just be a side effect.

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Mesh seems to still be the top priority. Two of the release channels are running Mesh Enabled versions; Le Tigre and Magnum. Blue Steel is running a Server Maintenance upgrade. The Lindens have posted in the Wiki what changes are coming over the next few upgrades.

Main Grid

The upgrade called Improved HTTP Service made it to the main grid last week. One of the items is improved texture fetch. As more users pile on HTTP Texture Get a problem was found in the servers and routers that handle the requests. Lately I’ve seen the time needed for textures to download go up. I’ve also seen more textures simply not download. I’ve also been in crowded places where I’ve changed groups 2 or 3 times to all the avatars to render. I still think changing groups to rez avatars sounds silly, but I see it work. This fix should correct the problem, but I can’t say I have seen improvement.

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I couldn’t make the Beta Server Group meeting Thursday. But I lucked out and Oskar got the minutes posted on the wiki. So, here is the interesting stuff.

Homestead Performance

A couple of weeks ago a problem caused the script timing in homesteads to go haywire and slow things down. This week the fix for that problem made it to the main grid. So, performance should be much better now.

Release Channels

The Wednesday roll of new code to the release channels was delayed until Thursday. Even then only the Magnum release channel got new code. This is the code that improves the HTTP service. In its first few hours Coyot Linden says it has performed well. If that is the case for the rest of the week it could roll to main grid next Tuesday.

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I’m writing this the last day of week 29. But, server news is always after the fact. For those working on Linden server code things have been busy for the past weeks. Updates to the community seem to be more brief than usual. They have been fixing more and writing less. So, my updates lag as I try to figure out where things are and make sense out what I read and hear. So, here is the latest information I have.

Week 28

Oskar Linden tells us that several things went wrong in week 28. We saw emergency roll backs. In the Mesh Prep 2 regions sculpties were suddenly being converted to tori. Not all sculpties were converted. Only those sculpties using a stitching type of none.

Stitching types are the way objects are unwrapped to work with how textures are applied. It is a sort of UVMapping thing. Cylinders have a simple style of unwrap that produces a rectangular shape. Think of cutting a cylinder down one side and spreading it out flat.

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