It seems the memory leak problem has finally been solved for the SL Viewer. We’ve had a number of false hopes that it was fixed. But now the main production viewer has updated. That is a sure indication the problem is fixed. That does not mean every problem is fixed. But, the problem causing a high crash rate in the Beta & Dev viewers is fixed. So, fixes can now start to roll again. For the last few weeks updates had stopped while the problem was tracked down. So, we sort of have open floodgates and a surge of updates rolling out. Viewer versions are changing quickly.
The Development viewer is at version: 3.4.4-267322
The Beta viewer is at version: 3.4.3-267135 – Release Notes
ADITI is the preview grid for Second Life. This is where we test new scripts, mesh items, and lots of other stuff. It is popular with creators because uploads are free. Currently people are having problems logging in. The problem is caused by the hard drives for the ADITI database filling up.
Take-Away:
There will be discussion at Thursday’s Beta Server meeting on what may be the best solution for the problem. If you use the preview grid, you will probably want to be there for that meeting.
ADITI is smaller than the main grid and runs on less hardware. The database for assets on the ADITI is much smaller, hardware-wise. Oskar Linden, no longer on staff, was handling keeping the grid running. But, the situation required manual cleaning of the drives. Now that is proving a problem.
This week following the Thanksgiving holiday we move back to the regular server updates. The Main Channel gets the maintenance package that was running on all three release candidate channels. This package has the fix for linksets and objects larger than 64 meters. (BUG-166 – Something invisible pushes avatars around.)
Server Scripting Meeting November 2012
While some saw linksets larger than 64m as a good thing, it was being used to grief people and also accidentally causing problems. With this release the problem is ‘fixed’.
The notable change is Whiskey is now selling RL prints, giclee, of her Second Life™ art. Giclee is a high end printing process used for fine art. It is expensive, but it lasts. When one cannot afford original art, a giclee is the next best thing.
You can find the art for sale at Fine Art America. Getting the source for giclee printing is a bit of work. So, not all of Whiskey’s art is on Fine Art America. If you find something on Flickr, you can ask that it be uploaded.
Strawberry Singh has a post about a new game, Strangelings, expected to be out the first quarter of 2013. She says the Ozimals team has joined up with two former Lindens and a financial expert to form Flying Monkey Interactive, Inc. The team is developing a product platform called Toto that will run on iPad, the web, iPhone, and Facebook.
Strawberry Singh as a Strangeling
The Magic of Oz region has been remade to create a promotional and information spot in Second Life. It is an all mesh area. Check it out. Also bounce over to Strawberry’s blog and see the video she made. It shows the Strangling in all is awesome cutness: Strangelings & Mesh Oz!
There is an issue for some with the Mesh Deformer and the time it needs to calculate the mesh for offsetting. Kitsune Shan has been working with the Deformer and voicing concern about the time needed for the Deformer to kick in.
Kitsune Shan
Kitsune is proposing that we do something like what is done with avatar baking. The viewer does the bake and sends a composite image to the servers for everyone else to use. Of course that is being changed to a server side process now, where a new service in servers at the Lab will do the bake and send out the composite image. Kitsune would like to see something similar to that for the Mesh Deformer.
White Rabbit points outthe difficulties with attempting to cache the deformation calculations. White Rabbit has done some testing and finds the CPU time for the Deformer calculation is consistently small. She speculates that the long calc times come from the thread being a low priority process.
White Rabbit
The chances that Deformer calc’s will be cached server side is, in my opinion, slim to none. We do not have any statistics on the type of hardware being used with Second Life™. We know there is new stuff, way old hardware, and everything in between. But, AFAIK, we have no information on how much of each.
We have been told that number of users staying with SL Viewer 1.23.x is only 2 or 3%. Third Party Viewers that do not use SSE2 CPU commands is small. Read the SSE2 thing as meaning viewers that support really old computers. Their user bases are so small they fit within the 2-3% too. So, I’ll speculate that the Lab is not going to put much effort into something as complex as caching deformation data.
