Server

Tuesdays and Wednesdays, depending on your region, the server’s software is updated and the region restarted. New versions are rolled out early morning. On Tuesday it is the new Production version that is rolled out. On Wednesday a new Release Candidate is rolled out to the test regions. The Tuesday process takes between 4 and 5 hours.

The changes just rolled out and upcoming changes are discussed in Server Beta Office Hours. Here are the things I found interesting from the latest Server Beta office hours. One is a big one for builders. 

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On Tuesdays we usually get new software for the grid. On Wednesday new software arrives on the Release Candidate areas of the grid. The big feature for the main grid is TMalloc, which is about memory allocation and providing information to Linden Lab (LL) for debugging the software. I think this may also provide some improvement for region crossings.

It looks like we are getting caught up on fixes and will start to see new or improved features coming out. Most of these features are still in the line of problem solving, but will do things in new ways, hopefully reducing lag and other problems. 

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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. 

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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.

Estate Console

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.

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