I’ll do this update and another later in the week. We have some good news and some bad news.
First, the good. It seems the kernel (3.0) upgrade is working and roll has reached 20% of the grid. We may see that roll out increasing its pace. It does mean a region restart so many regions will be seeing 2 restarts today and some tomorrow. Others will be seeing an additional restart later in the week.
FBS Dagger's Large Airplane
Second, the Le Tigre region was rolled to the main channel. (Release Notes) Some people are reporting teleporter device problems. It seems to be associated with posJump(vector target_pos). However some people are having problems and others are not.
This week in The Server Beta User Group we have some social issues mixed in with the technical issues. At least the roll out for this week went well. But, the blow back from the RC KT channel started to get out of hand. Olie’s made a another fine mess that can’t be blamed on the Lindens.
Main Channel
The main grid gets the roll out from the Magnum Release Channel. This upgrade changes the Mute features to use the new People API. This means a mute in world is respected in your Feed and on the web site. It is unclear whether this includes the Market Place.
Server Room - Image by: Tom Raftery - Flickr
Don’t expect to see this working on the web sites for some time. The feature has to be rolled to all the simulators and then enabled on all of them before it can be enabled on the web sites. I am guessing we may see it working in January.
Blue Steel
This RC got a set of tools from diagnosing voice problems. In Andrew’s Friday meeting word came that fixes for some voice problems are in the update. It seems in the process of creating the tools it was possible to find some issues and deal with them. Rolling these tools to the grid will make it possible to more easily find voice problems.
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.
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.
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.
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.
