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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#SL Viewer 3.4.x Week 40

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There is good news coming from Oz Linden about the viewer. You probably remember I’ve been writing about a memory leak in the Beta and Development viewers. Their crash rates were way up from previous rates. Oz thinks the latest Beta Viewer 3.4.1-265434 has the problem resolved. Grab a copy of the viewer and try it out. They need as much testing data as possible. The data from over the weekend will give them good information on whether they have found the problem or not.

The Project Download Page

The problem has been difficult to reproduce. That means it is very hard to know what to fix. In #SL Viewer 3.4.x Week 37 I wrote about the problem in more detail.

The Development Viewer has been stalled at 3.4.2-265141 for about a week. The Lindens have been pulling updates and fixes out of the viewer code to narrow down the cause of the crashes. I suspect they are doing that work in a temporary code repository (repo for short) and using internal builds for testing. So, we don’t see activity in the Dev Viewer repo. The latest fixes are probably only in the Beta version.

If the problem has been resolved, development can move forward again. Oz says they have several interesting features waiting in the pipeline. He just won’t talk about them. So, what’s interesting to him, a  p r o g r a m m e r, and us may be different… But, there is hope there is something fun waiting.

Keep your fingers crossed and run a copy of the Beta Viewer. Use the link in the left column labeled SL Viewer Release. The Beta Viewer’s link is a little further down the page. I downloaded it yesterday. I’ve only used it for a short time. I will be using it more latter today. However, it has yet to eat my computer or crash

Patterns Released on Steam

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I got an email from Rod Humble today. It had my key and download instructions for Patterns.

New Patterns

Thank you for your recent pre-order of the genesis release of Patterns, a new and exciting shared 3D creative space from Linden Lab.

This email contains important information about how to immediately download and activate your purchase.

We’re happy to announce that Patterns is now available for download on Steam, a digital media and gaming distribution service. In order to activate your purchase, you will need the following activation key.

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