Server

#SL News Week 23

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Griefer Monday cut into Kelly’s and Nyx Linden’s meetings. So, not much news from those meetings. I think pretty much everyone knows about the Advanced Creator or Experience Tools getting lose from the Release Channels.

Earthquake Map

One of the Scripting/Server meetings was hijacked by Slee Mayo’s fun new educational toy. It uses the LSL functions for HTTP data queries to make a live near real time map of earthquakes. See the opening image. Plus I was distracted and late getting there and they stopped posting transcripts in early May, so not much news from that meeting.

SVC-7902

SVC-7902 – Problem of not being able to rez on my land continues. This fix went to release channel Magnum Wednesday.

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#SL News Week 22

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We have a bit more news on this week’s roll outs to the Release Channels. Actually some BIG news.

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More information below the fold.

Blue Steel

This channel will be updated Thursday instead of Wednesday. The package will contain an avatar render change. The avatars in the Library will now have pre-baked textures.

You probably know that the viewer downloads all the textures worn by an avatar and bakes them intop a composite texture. So, skin, tattoos, alpha layers, undershirt, and shirt layers are baked into a composite. That is uploaded to SL and is the image others download. Even you download a copy, which is why you see your avatar start blurry then render crisp, which is the end of the bake, then go blurry and then hopefully crisp again.

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#SL Server News Week 21

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I’m a bit behind on general news.

Servers

Andrew Linden has been gone on vacation this week. Simon Linden facilitated the User Group. He says they are expecting to roll the Threaded Region Crossing code to the main grid this coming Tuesday. This is code they have been bouncing in and out of the Release Channels (RC) since February. Getting it to the main grid is a significant step.

Once Threaded Region Crossing code is in place effort can concentrate on Phase II of Region Crossing. It is only in Phase II that users will start to see changes in crossing performance. You may not know that significant region lag is caused by avatars exiting regions. The rumor is most of that lag has been eliminated in Phase II code. That should make a significant difference in region performance for events and other crowded regions.

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#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.