Second Life News 2014-47

Group Chat

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.

Servers

Photo Shoot w/Mr. S
Photo Shoot w/Mr. S

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.” 

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Week of 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 regions will be affected, but I’m not sure.

So, we aren’t really sure what they are checking. It may just be they are giving the gerbils their flu  shots.

Second Life News 2014-46 #2

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.

Blood Letters 2014
Blood Letters 2014

CDN

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.” 

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Second Life News 2014-46

Group Chat

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.

Blood Letters - Mad Pea 2014
Blood Letters – Mad Pea 2014

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. 

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Second Life News 2014-45 #2

ADITI

There is a bug some encounter when logging into ADITI, the preview grid.

BUG-7707 – “Login at last location” not working for any region on Aditi & other assorted weirdness with teleporting.

Don't Panic 2014 - End of Game
Don’t Panic 2014 – End of Game

For now the Lindens think it has something to do with which inventory server your viewer has connected to. Simon Linden said, “…one of the back-end servers for this grid was having troubles and that’s behind some of the problems like logging into the last location.”

Until the Lindens fix it, there nothing we can do to get ‘last location’ working.

Maestro Linden advised us, “There was also an issue until yesterday [Wed 11/5] where Aditi mainland had “Allow Direct Teleport” disabled.  So you’d end up at a telehub in Ahern when trying to TP to Morris, etc.” He also advised us that the ‘troubled’ server had been fixed. I tried last location in ADITI this morning. It worked correctly. 

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Second Life News 2014-45

Servers

There is a roll going to the main channel this morning. The Deploy thread in the forum describes it as ‘minor improvements’. Not much to go on.

RC Channels

There is no package ready for the RC Channels. Caleb Linden says there will be no roll of the RC Channels.

Deyanira Yalin - Builder's Brewery Class Instructor
Deyanira Yalin – Builder’s Brewery Class Instructor

Problems

I am seeing more people complaining about texture loading and render stalling and things remaining gray or blurry. It is still a small number of people, which means the Lindens are not going to turn their attention to the problem. They are watching for problems from Pipeline and CDN changes. So, that may reveal the problem.

If you are consistently running into the problem, file a JIRA. To helpful the Lindens needs lots of detail and a way to reproduce the problem. If this is a timing issue, the Lindens may not be able to reproduce it from within the Lab, they are sitting on the servers and miss out on some of the problems we see.

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