Category Archives: Server

#SL Server Update Week 47 & 48

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This week has been a bad one for region restarts. There was a problem with the update rolled out to the main grid. The update had to be rolled back later in the day. This means most of the upgrades running in the release channels didn’t upgrade. So, what happened?

Roll Fail

Since this release has been through QA and came from a release channel, how did it get past the testing and yet be so bad it had to be rolled back?

Oskar and Steven Linden explained at the recent Beta Server User Group and Maestro in the Deploys thread in the forum what happened. It seems a region would crash and begin its restart, which is what it is supposed to do… well… not the crash part. The new problem triggered the simulator to restart all the regions in the host. In the logs this looked like an estate manager restart of the non-crashed regions. Since no one reported problems during the test week on the release channel and the restarts didn’t register as a warning in the grid monitoring reports, no one noticed the problem. It was too small to see in the release channel.

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Second Life Mute-Block Changing

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Second Life users have the ability to block/mute those that people that annoy them, both voice and chat. One can also mute objects that are spamming them. Once blocked you cannot:

  • See text chat, hear voice chat, or receive IMs from that person or object.
  • See particles emitted by the blocked avatar or object.
  • Receive items from the blocked object.

But, muting is not fool proof. You can mute someone in-world and it has no effect in, I think, group chat, the market place or in the new social features. I don’t do much muting…

Running on the release channel Magnum is a new update that has the code to move muting from the simulators into what the Lindens call the People API’s. These are the API’s that will become the primary call for all communication tasks in Second Life. The People API is or will be queried to get the information needed to establish a communication cannel. So, it is in a perfect place to control the communication.

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#SL Server Performance

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People notice problems and complain when the problems interfere with their Second Life. We say much less when things work well. In the line of the latter there is an interesting aside to Friday’s huge meeting in Denby.

Simulator User Group 11-2011

The meeting was the weekly Simulator User Group. It typically has 10 to 20 attendees. This past Friday it filled to capacity. At one point there were 80 people in the region and 30 to 40 in the two adjacent regions.

The meeting was interesting in its own right. But, an interesting bit of information is how well the region did handling the crowd.

In the image I have with the article #SL Server News Week 44 you can see a region performance meter displaying the script count, memory use, and time slice used by each avatar’s scripts. The maximum script count was 174, which is high but not uncommon. It looks like the median script count is around 10.

I was curious to see how the region was holding up. I wasn’t about to start dancing or running in circles. I did not want to do anything that would have any possibility of crashing me out of the region. I  had problems getting in when the occupancy count was 54.

The viewer statistics (Ctrl-Shift-1) show region performance. Time Dilation is an indicator of how well the region is or isn’t handling the region’s script load. With 60+ avatars in region Time Dilation was staying in the range of 1.00 to 0.90 most of the time, which I think is rather impressive.

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#SL Server News Week 44

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A few surprises this week, not the good kind. Some problem has been preventing regions from shutting down and coming back up on the new code. This affected thousands of regions. All of the ones affected by the problem are in the main release channel. Support was swamped. The roll out of the new server update was delayed for several hours.

Server Scripting User Group 11-2011

Speculation by some is that the recent OS Update was causing the shutdown problem. Oskar Linden pointed out that they have had shutdowns since the update and those shutdowns worked just fine.

Tuesday’s roll out was delayed as problems were resolved. The roll finished on Wednesday. So, Wednesday’s roll was pushed to Thursday. The details for the week follow. Simon Linden says investigation is ongoing and some fixes are in the pipeline.

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#SL Region Crossings

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Well… things are a mess in regard to region crossings. Andrew’s Friday afternoon meeting was overrun with region owners, sailors, and aviators looking to find out when regions crossings would be working better. 54± people were in Denby, which made it hard for me to get in. Later in the meeting there were 80 people in the region. Persistence does work. 40+ were in Longfellow and 10 or so were stuck in Hanley.

Full Regions for Server Script Meeting

Some of the meeting was relayed to the Second Life Beta group chat.

Since the latest server update and the recent kernel updates region crossings with vehicels have become a problem. Walking or flying across is less of a problem then attempting to drive, sail, or fly a vehicle across.

There is also concern about the Havok upgrade that went into testing this week.

Whatever the case, sailors and aviators showed up in mass at Fridays user group meeting. I’ll have more information later, after I have time read through some chat logs and meeting minutes. Watch for Server News.

#SL Server News Week 43

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Over the weekend regions going offline became a problem. On Tuesday a Grid Status notice was posted regarding the problem. So far there is little more information on the problem. There is a little more below.

Main Channel

An update running on Blue Steel and Le Tigre has been promoted to the main grid. This update has fixes and a new feature. It brings an LSL (Linden Scripting Language) function labeled  llManageEstateAccess(). Some are already using the function to build tools that lets group members ban people without the member having to be an estate manager. Very handy.

Release Channel Update Window

The Lindens are improving the Wednesday timeline for updates. The window is to be between 7 and 11 AM PD/SLT. It can take longer if the hit bumps. In general updates to all three channels should happen within the window. Magnum is updated first, then Blue Steel, then Le Tigre. So, you can approximate where in the window your region fits.

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#SL Server News Week 42

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We got several complaints this week. I’m not sure how many of them are real. But, when the foundation shifts everything shakes. The HTTP Inventory Services made it to the main grid. That type of fundamental change usually comes with some problems.

Server Meeting 2011/10/20

Critical OS Updates Complete

Oskar Linden announced that about 3 PM Thursday this update process completed. All LL servers have now been updated.

The additional restarts for the COS updates are over.

It appears this update may have partially or completely solved SVC-5040 – Script performance dropped on regions deployed on class 7 hardware since rolling restart.

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#SL Server News Week 41

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This meeting of the Beta Server Group was Oskar Linden’s 100th office hour/user group meeting. Lots of fireworks. Oskar started dealing with server QA two years ago. At that time there was a server roll out every quarter. Oskar feels most things have changed for the better. Post a congrat in his FEED.

Server Beta 10/13

Main Channel

Tuesday the Fast Scripts update rolled to the main grid. The upgrade improves the performance of a number of script functions. The functions improved are those that do NOT change the properties of objects, so mostly llGet…() functions.

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