Server

Interest List

Andrew Linden is still working on rewriting the interest list code. He says he is seeing light and should have working code soon. He hopes to have it done this week (43).

Andrew told us, “…Dan Linden noticed that the “number of objects in view” right after the login curtain comes up, in a busy region, is less in my code than server-trunk, which means that my interest list wasn’t doing as good of a job of loading initial content. But I think I’ve got that fixed, and am planning on implementing the “gradually increase camera far clip on login” behavior that some 3rd party viewers have already hacked on their end, which should help the initial login sorting.”

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Blake Sea and Le Tigre

You probably remember the region crossing problems sailors and pilots had with the previous Havok Physics Engine update. Putting different versions of Havok on adjacent regions creates problems. Havok was never designed for use across multiple versions of Havok. It’s use by Linden Lab™ is the only known use that encounters that problem. So, we will likely have crossing problems with each update of Havok.

With the addition of Pathfinding and possible other gaming features to Second Life™ we are likely going to see more updates of Havok, but fortunately, less crossing problems. ‘More’ is like a couple a year.

Region Organization

Some weeks ago the Lab tried placing adjacent regions in the same or adjacent servers, physically adjacent servers. This made what Oskar Linden described as a ‘MASSIVE improvement’ in performance. Now it is standard operating procedure to keep the regions and servers organized.

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This Tuesday we got a roll to the main channel. This is the package that was on Blue Steel. This is the code to improve performance for Large Groups. It is not the Large Group Editing changes that Baker has made. Those changes are in a package still stuck in QA.

It has been quite since the roll out. That usually means things are working as expected.

Magnum

Is going to continue to run the same package it has had for the last couple of weeks. This is a package that adapts the simulator to the new hardware. It contains various configuration changes for the Denebian OS running in the region servers. I have no information whether this is identical to last week or some configuration settings are changing. Whatever the case, it is expected users won’t see any difference.

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This continues to be a problem for event managers. Toysoldier is getting more and more Lindens to look at the forum thread for BUG-355 – Increased Instant Sim Lag & Avi Crashes During Major Events – sim network issue. (Limited access)

Andrew did not realize people were putting in the tech info needed to actually find the problem in the logs. I hope he has realized and taken a look at the thread: Increase in Instant SIM LAG & Crashes During Larger Events – Network Source?

Simon has responded in the thread: M7808.

Thanks for the reports, Toy … there’s some good information there that seems to shows the simulator getting into trouble when there are network problems.

If you are seeing the problem in your travels through the grid, read the thread so you know what to report and add your information. Please do not add noise. Just saying, “I saw that. Me too.” doesn’t help and actually hurts the process.

Toysoldier asks:

Next time one of your sims encounters one of these major lag events…. take a snapshot of the Advanced Performance screen and post it here.  The important stats to look at are related to the NETWORK stats. 

What has been initially noticed (and we would like more evidence of it from stale sims) is that some event triggers the the sim or the server kernel’s network driver or something related to the network to not process network packets at a normal flow.  Even at a low avi count and with other metrics looking normal, the network stats show unusually high pending downloads and very high un-acked packets.

But, we need more examples (snapshots of the performance stats) of a sim when it has fallen into this state.  Also make sure you mention date/time and the name of the sim. 

The thread: Increase in Instant SIM LAG & Crashes During Larger Events – Network Source?