Second Life’s HTTP Tech Note Explained

There is a section in the Second Life™ forum about technology: Tools and Technology. Thursday afternoon (1/16) Linden lab posted article there titled: Raising the Roof: The HTTP Project. The post is about the changes coming to how the SL Viewer and SL servers communicate.

The abbreviated point in the post is: communication between our viewers and the servers is and is going to be better and does and will use less bandwidth. This means fewer problems logging into Second Life. Also, more reliable connections and fewer disconnects. The changes will mean fewer capabilities from routers and gateways will be used, allowing the less expensive routers to handle Second Life better. And in general things will download faster.  Continue reading

Looking Ahead Week 32

Viewer Development

Viewer development process changes a bit. The Lab is changing the release process a touch too. More likely now we will see Third Party Viewer (TPV) Developers releasing betas and development viewers rather than production releases, the later being the stable version intended for general use.

The Lab has gotten much more metric driven about their crash rates. They are putting more effort into holding the lid on the Linden Viewer crash rates. This means code in the Beta and Development viewers are likely to see more testing and changes before new code makes it into the release viewer. That is good thing, but may slow things down.

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