#SL Testers Needed Oct 11

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Oskar Linden posted in the SL Forum requesting help testing some network changes. I suspect this is related to the Sudden Lag I’ve been writing about. See: Networking Optimization Pile On Test – October 11th

Linden Lab has made some changes to the way regions handle network traffic. We need your help to test. This will help us insure that regions are communicating appropriately over the network. Mainly we are concerned with agents entering via direct login, teleport, and region crossing. As well as other functions such as IMs, Voice, and Group chat.

Tomorrow, October 11th, at 4PM Pacific time (right after the server beta user group) we will conduct these tests with as many people as we have. Testing will take place on ADITI and require out of world communication we will be coordinating via IRC. This will require an IRC client connected to EFNET in the channel #sltest. If you don’t know how to do that you have until tomorrow afternoon to figure it out. 🙂

The details on the tests are here:

 – https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Networking_Optimization_Pile_On_Tests

I hope you can come and help us test these new changes.

__Oskar

The test procedure is described in the SL Wiki. See: Networking Optimization Pile On Tests.

These tests will be on the ADITI grid.

#SL News 1 Week 41

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There was a roll to the main channel this week. It seems to have gone well. At least all the regions get a restart after 3 weeks or so. The package was the one running on the Blue Steel RC Channel. It is a minor update and should have no visible effect on the simulator behavior. This is a release needed to enable a coming release.

Server & Scripting UG Oct 2012

Magnum

Will get a new package. It will be the main channel code plus the changes to allow better use of the new hardware. Not knowing exactly what hardware the Lab is upgrading to… its hard to speculate on what the change may be. Presumably, if they are running Intel, they may be adding more threading features for the iCore series chips. If they run AMD, I have no clue.

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Sudden Lag on the Radar

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Toysoldier Thor has been relentlessly tracking down the causes of his in-world event crashes and sudden massive lag. Region owners and event managers have been collecting and providing data on the problem in the forum. See my previous article: New Lag Problem. See the forum thread here: Major Increase in Instant SIM LAG & Crash during large events.

Simon Linden acknowledged the effort and is starting to get people on the trail of the problem.  From Toysoldier:

From Simon Linden…
” 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. ”

I think now that we have a possible smoking gun… the LL staff can focus their investigation on the NETWORK.

Having more sim /region owners post the same performance statistics during one of these extreme lag events would help us further confirm the root cause.

If you are seeing this problem, read the thread and post the requested information from your occurrence of the event. Filing a JIRA works too.

Treet TV’s Pathfinding Episode

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Treet TV is an ongoing broadcast team presenting in Second Life™ and streamed on the web. Their studio is at Garden of Dreams. They present their shows there via Media on a Prim (MOAP) and on Parcel Stream. Each Monday at 2PM (SLT/PT) they have a new Designing Worlds show. At other times you can find other shows being presented. Happy Hunting has a regular show for hunters. Plus, there are drama shows and series with weekly episodes. Check out the full range at Treet.tv.

Cute Horatio Pathfinding Character

Pathfinding

Monday October 8th Designing Worlds presented their interview with the Lindens on Pathfinding, the new feature in SL that I’ve been covering for months. Sandry Logan was interviewed on Isle of Dogs, which is the home of the Virtual Kennel Club of Second Life. They have a new line of trainable companion dogs. Check out the web site for more information.

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Metareality Index Week 40

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I’ve been gone all weekend, a wedding to attend. So, writing up the latest Metareality podcast has had to wait. The podcast is: Not Cool… well the podcast is. They are referring to Second Life™ not being cool.

As always this outline is my take on what I hear and may or may not relate to what you hear when listening to the podcast.

Metareality Podcasts

00:50 – Is Drax a real name? Karl is messing with Drax. But, then Drax gets to take some funny takes on the German thing about Stiefvater.

03:30 – Exodus Viewer slider scandal Drax is involved in… this too is funny and you have to listen to appreciate it.

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#SL Large Group Edit Update Wk40

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Wednesday we got three packages rolled to the Release Candidate (RC) channels. The changes for Large Group Editing were in the package that rolled to the Le Tigre channel. While the packages rolled to Blue Steel and Magnum worked well, something went wrong in the Le Tigre roll out.

Large Groups – Image by: KittyKat3756 – Flickr

Something in the code is miscalculating the prim cost/count and forcing the return of large numbers of prims. You can imagine the screams. Very quickly the Lindens realized they had a problem. While they didn’t know the cause as of Thursday, they do know a massive number of prims were being returned.

The Le Tigre regions were rolled back and the package running on Blue Steel, a maintenance package, was rolled over Le Tigre. Unfortunately that roll could not undo the damage of returned prims. So, the damaged regions had to be restored to the region state previous to the damaging roll out.

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