Second Life and Virtual Worlds
This morning (Wednesday) Linden Lab rolled a new package to the RC server channels. This afternoon, about 4:30 PM SLT, they rolled the RC channels back to the previous version.
This happens when something goes side ways and crash rates, complaints, or server metrics show a problem.
We have no word on what the problem was. Expect word to come in the Beta Server user group meeting Thursday.
No roll for the main channel of Second Life™ this Tuesday.
Second Life’s three RC channels all got the same package, a maintenance release. This one has a change in how large groups are handled. I think meaning the member list downloading. There are also more changes to the server log reporting process.
At the Server-Scripting meeting Simon Linden talked about adding a setting to allow them to change the number of avatars a region will allow in before locking access. But, I doubt that change made it into this package.
The idea being worked on is how to get more people in a region and not over load the server or viewer. This new server/region setting allows easy changes to max population for the purpose of testing. That might hint at what the additional changes to logging are about.
Monty Linden posted an update in the Technology forum. See it here: Second Life Network Architecture.
Quoting:
To the left (in red) are pieces of the viewer. To the right (in blue) are simhost/simulators and other backend services. And at bottom (in green) are new CDN services.
Solid lines with arrowheads are communication paths, either UDP or TCP/HTTP. Dashed lines indicate legacy communication paths that are now or soon will be deprecated, obsoleted and/or deleted.
Ball-and-stick objects between a communication path and a text label indicate a viewer debug setting and the communication path or paths that setting influences. These, too, are in solid and dashed flavors. The latter indicating obsolescence. And as always, at least one error crept into my diagram. In this case, the ‘HttpPipelining’ setting only influences mesh and texture communications. Inventory is currently unaffected by this setting. [Image has been corrected – ed]
Generally, things are moving in the direction of simplification and less resource conflict. The mesh and texture HTTP traffic, which is usually the greatest load, tends to part ways with the UDP traffic a few network hops after a user’s router or modem. Lacking TCP’s throttling mechanism, UDP often wins in a fight (give-or-take the efforts of fairness algorithms along the path). Allowing UDP to overrun the path between viewer and simulator does still degrade the experience and the bandwidth setting remains an effective tool for avoiding this problem.
Other settings should generally be left alone. A lot of bad advice was spread around in the community in an effort to work around throughput problems. We’re trying to undo that history and get back on track with more typical (albeit aggressive) HTTP patterns.
From the Third Party Viewer UG meeting we get a little news. It was another short meeting.
RC Second Life Big Bird Viewer version 3.7.29.301361 – This viewer has fixes for some attachment-related issues. The Lindens are not anticipating any difficulties with this viewer, so this one should be moving to promotion as the default viewer soon.
There are some server side fixes for attachment problems that are in the works.
Server updates are coming slower than in 2013 and 2014. The Lab seems to be settling into an update every other week. This week the RC channels saw and update roll out, but not last week. The main channel did not get a roll out this week, but did last week.
My thinking is that after 3 or more years of intense weekly bug fixing, the Lab has to be running out of bugs. In the last 30 days only 229 issues have been filed. Some number of those are duplicates. Of those 200 have been handled. There is probably some way to separate out viewer, web, and server issues. But, I haven’t tried. A quick count across the first page of issues gives me the impression about 20% of the issues are sort of server related. So, that is about 40 issues for the last 30 days and presumably 30 something of those are fixed.
Being gone for almost 2 weeks, there is lots for me to catch up on. These are the things I found interesting.
I previously mentioned this. But, now the new avatar height and hover controls officially have their counterparts in the Linden Scripting Language (LSL): LLGetObjectDetails() and LLGetAgentSize(). See: New LSL support for Avatar Shape, Height and Hover.
A part of LLGetObjectDetails() is the flag: OBJECT_HOVER_HEIGHT – Gets the hover height of the avatar.
If id is not an avatar, 0.0 is returned. Normal values are in the range of-2.0 to 2.0 with a default value of 0.0. This value does not reflect the avatar shape’s “Hover” setting, only the dynamic viewer setting.