2020 Simulator User Group week #16 summary

The following notes were taken at the Simulator User Group meeting held on Tuesday, April 14th.

Simulator Deployments

Please refer to the simulator deployment thread for updates.

• On Tuesday, April 14th, the majority of the grid was updated to server maintenance update 539684, previously deployed to an RC channel on April7th, and comprising:
  • BUG-228417 Emails created by llTargetedEmail() in deeded objects show owner as NULL_KEY in the received email metadata.
  • BUG-228412 Emails created by llTargetedEmail() are missing header info in the received email.
  • SL-12941 Disable TARGETED_EMAIL_ROOT_CREATOR in llTargetedEmail
  • SL-11502 New LSL function llTargetedEmail
  • BUG-226917 EEP Environment, New Sky should default to midday and not 6pm
  • BUG-226737 [EEP] The ‘get parcel_dayoffset’ request returns the value of the ‘parcel daylength’ parameter in the Region Debug Console.
• On Wednesday, April 15th, two RC deployment should take place:
  • 540032 – containing infrastructure updates related to the cloud migration.
  • 540037 – containing fixes for the just released name changes after it was discovered the feature could, in a couple of places still call you by your former name for up to a week (“oops!”, as the Lab put it), and assorted internal changes.

SL Viewer

At the time of writing, there had been no updates to the current crop of official viewers to mark the start of the week, leaving the current official viewer pipelines as follows:

• Current Release version  version 6.3.8.538264, dated March 12, promoted March 18th. Formerly the Premium RC viewer – No change.
• Release channel cohorts:
  • Camera Presets RC viewer, version 6.3.9.538729 March 25.
  • Love Me Render RC viewer, version 6.3.9.538760, March 25.
  • EEP RC viewer updated to version 6.4.0.538823, March 20.
  • Zirbenz Maintenance RC viewer, version 6.3.9.538719, issued March 19.
• Project viewers:
  • Copy / Paste viewer, version 6.3.5.533365, December 9, 2019.
  • Project Muscadine (Animesh follow-on) project viewer, version 6.4.0.532999, November 22, 2019.
  • Legacy Profiles viewer, version 6.3.2.530836, September 17, 2019. Covers the re-integration of Viewer Profiles.
  • 360 Snapshot project viewer, version 6.2.4.529111, July 16, 2019.

Group Chat

With the general increase in user concurrency, issues are being experienced with group chat (general slowness, sent messages failing, etc). Commenting on the situation, Simon Linden said:

Group chat traffic grows in “interesting” mathematical ways … a single person will have X number of groups, and thus joins them all and increases the number of people in the group. That multiplies out as groups get larger so a single message goes to more people … it’s not linear. Add in the updates on people coming on-line or logging off and it bogs down –  and yes, we’ve done some work on it and want to get time for more.

A factor that’s likely contributing to the issue is that the plan to cut back on the number of group update messages created when users log-on  / log-off of Second Life was actually curtailed, with Simon also noting:

[There was] some pretty strong push-back that managers need that info … so it got more complicated about who should get what messages when, and the project went back on the shelf. But you can imagine the math … if you have a group with about 10 people on-line, every once in a while someone joins or leaves, and about 10 updates have to be sent out. Put 1000 people in a group … people are coming and going all the time, and 1000 updates have to go out if everyone needs to know

And yes – there are some different ways it can be fixed. The real issue is people getting upset if they can’t do something any more, and finding that magic spot where it works right for those that need the feature, and not a load slowing down chat for everyone