Second Life Group Lists

You probably don’t know that Second Life group member lists do not fully load for groups with over 5,000 members, unless you manage a large group. And now the Lab will soon be having the servers NOT send the full list to the viewer. This change is a work-around for a problem impacting group chat.

Paint Us like a Group of Your French Girls.

Paint Us like a Group of Your French Girls. by VOIDAR // Ashley Carter, on Flickr

This coming change is NOT related to the new 60-groups limit. That is having no measurable impact on group chat. But, downloading LARGE member lists is creating a problem, apparently whether 1 or 60.  Continue reading

#SL Large Groups Edit Rolled Out

Builder’s Brewery sent out an announcement about the Large Group Edit Change (SVC-4968 – readable by all) that rolled out this last Tuesday (week 46). The new code should be on all regions now. The Beta viewer has the code to take advantage of the change.

Whoever wrote the announcement wasn’t quite up on what the changes do and how they affect you but, for practical purposes they are close enough. If you have followed the coverage here, I think you’ve heard better details.

A quick recap of Large Groups, somewhere over 10,000 to 15,000 members, is they could not be loaded for editing. If you fiddled enough you might get a 20k or so group to load. The actual size of a list that could be loaded depended on how well SL was performing and your connection. This made it generally impossible to edit large lists. So, members that hadn’t logged into SL for a year or more could not be pruned out of the group. Roles in the group could not be changed. That has been fixed.

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#SL News 2 Week 41

Viewer 3.4.x Problem

Oz Linden has given us some news on the crashing problem they have had with the Beta and Development viewer. The Lindens believe the current Beta viewer (3-4-1-265642) has the memory leak, or whatever, fixed. The crash rate is back to low rates.

For the techies, the problem had to do with how the cURL wrapper was threaded. The cURL thing has to do with computer network communication over networks. It is a programming library that makes it easier for programmers to implement communication protocols like HTTP and HTTPS. It helps with encrypting communications.

Wind Vectors Displayed – Red Lines

One more round of testing in the Beta viewer is in progress. Once completed the basic fix and changes will move to the main release viewer, likely next week (42).

It takes a couple of days of testing to collect enough data to make a determination on whether a fix is working or not. The current Beta Viewer was compiled on Saturday and released on Monday. If you have Auto-Update on, you got it before it was on the web site.

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#SL Large Group Edit Update Wk40

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 News 1 Week 40

Not much news this week. Plus I have been trying to resuscitate dying laptops. Seems to be a rash of those this week.

UPDATE: 1:54 PM PT – Le Tigre had serious problems and is being rolled back to the previous version. The regions have to be rolled back to get an earlier version of the server software. That is an automated process. Next all the regions in Le Tigre have to be manually updated to a previous SIM state prior to the problems. There are a over 1,000 regions to do. It is going to take some time.

Main Channel

There was no roll of a new server package to the main channel. Last week no Release Candidates made it to the RC channels, so there was nothing to roll.

There is a the New Lag Problem. This problem is pretty much invisible to the Lindens, meaning it is not showing up in their stats. Nor is it an easily reproducible problem. Both of those things make it invisible to the Lindens for all practical purposes. However, those running events are pulling their hair out dealing with the problem.

So, if you are an event manager or promoter, you will want to record the date and time, nearest minute, the lag hit, get as close as you can. Attend the Server Beta and Server & Scripting user group meetings (Time & Location) and provide at least the server version, region name, and date time of the problem.

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#SL Group Edit Roll to RC

SVC-4968 – The large group editing problem JIRA is going to roll to the Release Candidate Wednesday 9/19. This is way ahead of what I was expecting.

This means that sometime around noon anyone with a copy of the project viewer (see the JIRA to get a copy) can visit a region in the RC channels and edit groups with more than 10k members. If you have never logged into the JIRA, I have links too.

You may not want to be the first person to try this new feature. But, you may. Whichever, realize that the viewer feature is not a completed and polished product. There is no progress bar and it can take some time for a large group to load. So, be patient. Some large groups, 40k, could take minutes to load.

Older viewers will not be able to take advantage of the feature. Third party viewers (TPV) are getting the feature. We will likely see it in TPV’s before it appears in the Linden Release Viewer, especially considering the problem the 3.4.x series is having.

Group Edit Update Week 37

Update: The JIRA post was updated 07/Sep/12 5:07 PM. ADITI regions Aglia and Chooqu Clone have the new server code.

Group Edit changes are moving forward. The server program with the changes was being built (compiled) on September 7th. My previous article included links to the Project viewer and the JIRA. The test regions in ADITI will be posted in the JIRA.

JIRA – SVC-4968 – Group won’t load – too many members

For now, bugs found by Third Party Viewer Developers won’t be able to be added to this SL JIRA item, unless they are individually added to the correct JIRA groups. You can tell if you are in the group by looking at the bottom of the JIRA item’s page. If there is a Comment Button, you are in the right group, provided the item has not been closed.

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Second Life Group Edit Update Week 36

Baker Linden was at Friday’s Server-Scripting User Group meeting. He updated us on this week’s progress.

My news is that my group member changes will soon be deployed on ADITI. You’ll need a development viewer to test (on ADITI). You can find them here:

I’ll be posting in the JIRA (SVC-4968) on which regions this will be enabled (on ADITI).

There may be some issues during testing. When getting the member list of a large group, other info (group title, group info, etc.) may not properly load. This is an issue with the speed of ADITI’s  SQL server and shouldn’t occur once live on AGNI. To receive the rest of the data, wait for the member list to appear (this can be upwards of a few minutes), go back to the My Groups panel of the people floater and view the group profile again. The query will be cached this time, and the member list will appear quicker than it did before (depending on your connection speed). The rest of the information should be received this time.

If you find any problems while testing, please send me [Baker Linden] a message in-world (on AGNI) or email baker -at- lindenlab -dot- com.

This means we are getting close to having the update in a viewer for use on AGNI, the main grid. I think 4 to 6 weeks, but it may be sooner. When this rolls to the main channel older viewers not using the new group editing API code will be limited to editing groups equal to or less than 10,000 members.

I expect all Third Party Viewers to be adopting this code. I suspect the Phoenix viewer may be pushed into the ‘old’ viewer group and not get it. But, its awesome decedent: Firestorm, will certainly get the update.