Server

Second Life™ data centers are located in Phoenix and Dallas according to Maestro Linden. He is not sure but thinks there is another in DC. A few months ago the Lab was consolidating from three data centers to two. So, it is probably two, but one never knows.

When asked, Maestro confirmed there is no data center in San Francisco.

If you geo-locate the region IP addresses (site) you can get from the viewer’s Help-About…, you will probably find the addresses are in other locations. For me most regions appear to be served from San Francisco. I suspect that if you are on the east coast of the USA you’ll find them in a different city, but I’m not sure. Let me know if you check it.

I’m about 460 miles from San Francisco and about 300 miles from Phoenix. So, one would think that I would connect to the closer servers in Phoenix. But, network traffic routes through the major backbones and data centers. Traffic leaving Southern California generally travels up to Los Angles (LA). For me to connect to a site in Cambridge, Mass. (173.223.104.110) my connection is through LA and up to Montréal, Canada and eventually to Cambridge. Not the most direct route for surface travel. The point being map distance is not the same as network distance.

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For some time we have had prims that don’t rez. Parts of a road or wall or something will be missing. If we right-click where they ‘should’ be, they snap into view. The problem is in the viewer. It is a years old problem, but generally rare. Recent Interest List changes have made it worse.

Andrew says there is a fix but the code is currently in very crashy viewer. After my day in Fantasy Fair I think the main, beta, and development viewers are all way crashy. I’m trying to chase down what’s up with that. I was having trouble staying on for more than 15 minutes at a time, which may be something on my side. Whatever, Andrew’s fix has not made it to the QA teams yet. They need to get the crashing fixed before it goes to them.

Andrew says the fix is in with the viewer code that has the viewer hinting for the server. This is the hinting that tells the server more about what the viewer needs and what’s in the viewer’s cache.

As it turns out the problem with the prims not rezzing comes from the viewer getting confused about what it has cached and can render and what it needs to wait to render. It has all it needs, but doesn’t realize it.

At best we won’t see the fix rollout for a couple of weeks. The viewer people are focused on getting SSA out. (Server Side Appearance – baking) Behind that is the Materials release. From our seats it is a coin toss for which is going to go through first; hinting and prim rez fix or Materials. Whichever, I expect it to be after SSA is rolled out.

There are some possible problems with SSA, think COF Corruption and unexpected surprises. If things go badly with SSA, that will delay the prim-rez-fix. We’ll have to wait and see what happens. And… things could go well.

Not much new news today. I think everyone is at the glorious Fantasy Fair. But, there are few things to be thinking about.

Network Lag

Users outside the US have seen some increased lag. There is no certainly as to where the problem is. If you are seeing high ping times read through Troubleshoot Your #SL Connection and file a JIRA with a TRACERT print out.

I can’t even get a sense of how large or small the problem may be. It is a technical glitch, so many people will not recognize what is happening.

There are a number of various threads on lag from overseas users. See: (chat delay outside US -FIXED-) Discussion: Why did a restart of secondlife fix this?

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There was no Deploys thread post this week. Maestro Linden was on vacation and not back. However, the server release notes did update.

Main Channel

This got what I’ll call the Animation Override package. That means the new animation overriding functions are now working grid wide. So, we will likely start to see some AO updates arriving.

At the server meeting today the Lindens were hearing no screams. So, we can assume it went well.

There is a crash fix in this package too.

Blue Steel & Le Tigre

These channels got preparatory work for the coming Experience Permissions System. Wow!

They call the changes Experience Keys. Simon is not sure what he can or cannot say about the project. So, we didn’t get much info, may be Thursday at the Beta Server meeting. 

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