Category Archives: Server

#SL News Week 21

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Region Idling

This is the server update that is advancing to the main grid today, Tuesday. I’ve been writing about Second Life® Region Idling for a few days now. So, if you don’t know about it see: #SL Region Idling and #SL News Update Week 20.

Open Source Meeting

Threaded Region Crossing

I’ve been writing about the Region Crossing Phase I code for some time, since about February. This is a major refactor of region crossing code. It touches many parts of the Second Life system. Because of its complexity it has been a difficult write. We have seen lots of problems from it. It has been rolled back from the Release Channels a number of times.

It looks like this code will stay on the Le Tigre and Magnum channels this week.

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#SL News Update Week 20

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Some transcripts got posted and there are some bits of news.

Balancing

You may remember that the Lindens started balancing the regions by running adjacent regions in the same physical server, or at least physically nearby servers. They also made changes to the system so that popular regions would not load into the same server. The change improved performance and up time.

Beta Server

Since there was no new software roll to the main channel this week, they took the opportunity to do more balancing work. More busy regions were moved in to non-busy hosts. Oskar Linden says this makes a huge difference. They were going to get us some neat graphs and do a blog post, but that has never happened.

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#SL Server News Week 20

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We did not get a roll to the main channel this week. The Region Crossing Phase I package failed in Release Channel (RC) testing. Since it failed, no new roll. It was worked on and is now running on Le Tigre and Magnum.

Region Idling

I wrote a short piece on that a couple of days ago. See: #SL Region Idling. That code is now running on Blue Steel.

OS Updates

The Lab has been upgrading server operating systems (OS) to a newer Debian version. Week 19 we saw 3 days of intermittent service in the evenings as backend systems were upgraded. This week Tuesday’s typical restarts were used to upgrade simulator OS’s. I don’t have any information on whether all the simulators were upgraded or not.

Missing Info

RL has been busier this week. So, I’ve missed some meetings and the Lindens are lagging getting the transcripts posted. So, I won’t have any more news until they post or I hear something from this afternoon’s meeting.

#SL Region Idling

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Simon Linden announced today that Region Idling will roll out to the Blue Steel Release Channel this Wednesday. If all goes well it will be completely invisble to Second Life users. So, if we can’t see it what good is it? Well, I’ll ‘splain.

When a region has no avatars in it and no one is looking into the region, what good does it do to run full blast? None. So, the plan is to have a region slow from 45 FPS to 10 FPS and release the CPU to spend more time on other regions. Ideally, the other regions running in the simulator will benefit from the extra CPU cycles.

You can read the announcement here: Region Idling coming to Second Life.

Possible Problem

The only likely problem the Lindens are expecting is scripts that use the function  llGetRegionTimeDilation() may have a problem. The function is not going to fail. But, if the script is using it as a region monitor to signal a problem with a region, it is likely going to be fooled and report a false positive. Normally 10 FPS is an indication there is a problem. Now going to 10 FPS to idle is an expected behavior. The scripts will have to rewritten.

 The FAQ’s on Region Idling

There is a FAQ page up: Region Idling FAQ

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#SL News Update Week 19

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Mesh Deformer Examples

It seems Inara & I are credited in some measure for getting the word out that mesh clothing examples are needed. Oz says a steady stream of examples are coming in now. If you want any say in how the Mesh Deformer works, get your samples to Oz Linden.

Server Beta Test Group

Spell Checking

Eventually the Linden SL Viewer will get spell check for chat. There is some user interface feedback to be handled and a couple of fixes. Then it can be merged into the viewer and begin moving through the QA pipe. No telling when the work will be completed.

The dictionaries to be packaged with the spell check are; US and UK English, Spanish Spanish, and Brazilian Portuguese.

See STORM-83 – Interactive Spell Checking. Also get a copy of the Spelling Project viewer.

People Search

There is some cleanup work for display names that is incomplete that apparently affects people search. Hopefully the cleanup work make people search better. Until then you may find it works better if you type in a name and click the drop down to search for people.

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The Size of Second Life

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Andrew Linden spoke to one of the people in engineering, I suppose the engineers in this case are the hardware and operations people that deal with running Second Life®. It was one of these engineers that got Andrew (more of a software engineer) the current size of the Asset Database.

Image by puuikibeach - Flickr

A couple of days ago Andrew guessed the database was about 4 terabytes. He did know a garbage collection run recently completed and reduced the database by 85%. But, Andrew’s guess was off a bit…

The engineer told Andrew the Asset DB is now 192 terabytes…

Working backward and knowing the current size that is 15% of the previous pre-garbage collection size we can deduce the Asset DB had grown to 1,280 terabytes or 1.3 petabytes or 1,280,000,000,000,000 bytes. That was a huge database and the post-garbage collection size isn’t exactly small.

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#SL News Week 19

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Kelly Linden provided some information on the Linden Scripting Language (LSL) function llGetAgentList(). The server maintenance package with this new function rolled to the main grid Tuesday. It rolled in spite of a problem. See JIRA item:

SCR-311 – llGetAgentList() with scope AGENT_LIST_PARCEL or AGENT_LIST_PARCEL_OWNER returns empty list when attached to avatar.

Server Scripting User Group

Of course those most interested in getting this feature intended to use it in avatar attachments. Frustrating. Kelly believes they can fix the problem and we’ll either see the fix pushed to the main grid or pop up in a release channel, depending on how well the fix goes.

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#SL Server-Script News Update Wk18

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Pathfinding

Pathfinding is closer to release. I expect we will see it arrive on the Release Channels this month.

Andrew Linden says they feel that are now feature complete for the initial release. I suppose this means that all the features the Lab believes are important for successful use of Pathfinding have been added. They still have bogs and issues to sort out. But, the feature set is fixed until after initial release.

Server/Scripting Meeting - Lego Chairs

They have decided to change the Pathfinding Tools in the viewer. Seems it is a work flow change that drives the need for viewer changes.

If you have used the viewer to edit Navmesh, you realize there are some klunks. Unfreezing the mesh, editing, and Freezing the Navmesh have some delay issues that have to be handled. Once a Navmesh has been changed and locked it takes some time for the server to recalculate the Navmesh. As Andrew says, may be tens of seconds. With multiple people editing the same Navmesh in a region you might imagine what problems a 20 to 40 second delay might cause them.

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