Second Life and Virtual Worlds
Blue Steel and Le Tiger Release Channels (RC) were both running the same RC last week. They had problems and are going into another round of testing with new fixes applied. However, Le Tiger is getting a different RC for testing. This is the first time the channels have had different candidates. This is sort of building the pipeline and then filling it.
I am surprised but today (6 AM SLT – Tuesday) they are rolling out the new server software with TCMalloc, the new memory allocator. I was not expecting this for another week or two. Apparently TCMalloc is the big change in this version. It will be interesting to see if this improves regions crossing and reduces Mono script rez problems.
The release notes are short. They don’t really tell us much… several crash modes and they don’t even mention TCMalloc. If you read them, the Conductor they mention is the watch dog that finds regions that need to be restarted and assigns regions to various servers. More work has been done on it.
There is also the Rollout System or deployment tools. Imaging copying new software to thousands of computers and updating settings. Getting this working well makes rollouts go faster and will allow rollouts to be moved to early mornings.
Will be an interesting day in SL.
Here is the latest I’ve found on what is going on with server updates. This spreads over the last 3 weeks.
The Server QA Team is looking at ways to give estate managers more control, like may be a command line type console to avoid time needed to develop a user interface, if the team can work out some problems. As a possibility, I think, it looks good. But, it may never happen.