Second Life and Virtual Worlds
This past Friday was the Third Party Developers meeting. Chakat NorthSpring has a video of the meeting: Second Life: Third Party Viewer meeting (21 November 2014). These meetings are consistently getting shorter. This one is down 30± minutes or so.
A couple of extra Linens were in attendance Friday; Brooke, Xiola and Bazz.
Oz Linden did his usual recap of viewer devlopment. He says they have lots of stuff in progress.
The Lab posted The Hardware Issues Behind Recent Region Restarts yesterday.
This is an excellent description of the problem. If you are unfamiliar with how rack servers are setup you may want a little more explanation.
The image above shows a classy looking rack server. If you have ever used a docking station with a laptop, you have an idea of the way they can work. Not all servers are so easy installed or removed from the ‘rack’.
Simon Linden Tells us:
Yes some of the chat servers have been having troubles in the last few days. I’ve been looking into that … the code running there isn’t super new, and the outages might be timed with some of those [hardware update] restarts.
In any case, there is an update soon for the chat servers, and already another in the pipeline.
This week there are no rolls for either the main channel or RC channels. Next week is a no change week. So, I expect no roll outs that week either.
We can expect tweaking to the CDN system. This week whatever they are doing that requires multiple restarts is ongoing.
The main reason for no updates is the hardware updating requiring the restarts scheduled for this week. Estimating time for any individual update or the group is difficult as Simon says, “We also have to actually open up the server box and look inside to see if it needs an update, so it’s random how long each one takes.
This shouldn’t do anything grid-wide, aside from extra region restarts.”
This morning the first question asked of Oz Linden on the Open Source User Group was; What’s with the restarts? See: Scheduled Maintenance. Oz was all ‘what restarts? Oh… those restarts…’ Saying: They’re doing some checks on some of our server hardware that requires that they take them down briefly. I don’t believe that all … Read more
There was not much new news revealed in the Beta Server User Group meeting this week. We seem to be getting sparse news, not that Lindens aren’t talking. There is just not much to talk about.
The rollouts to the RC Channels were tweaks to the Content Delivery Network (CDN). When Whirly Fizzle asked, “Are those CDN changes something users will notice?” Maetro Linden described them as: “No, it’s just a way to reconfigure the CDN URL if we need to. Eventually there’s a plan to make that point at a more ‘dynamic’ hostname, which is still being set up. However, there is some viewer work meant to address some of those CDN issues, to address BUG-7698 and similar ones.”
I think most people have noticed it is better. So far, I have been able to comment in groups such as Firestorm Support without a problem, a group I seldom could connect to. I could listen, but not post comments, about half or more of the time.
Posting to any large group was a problem. That has now mostly been resolved.
We are losing the open post of any chat that starts after I login. In some cases it is not noticeable. In others it is apparent. The Lindens are aware of it.
Today grid status reported the internal utilities servers would be getting updates. In the Server Scripting meeting we learned that additional changes to group chat were being rolled out. So, this is likely that change going into place. The Lindens say not to expect visible improvements. That doesn’t mean there aren’t any, just that they are not likely to be as noticeable as previous changes.