The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, February 16th, 2021 Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting.
Server Deployments
At the time of writing, this is yet another week without published release notes. However, there was no deployment to the SLS Main channel on Tuesday, February 16th, leaving it on simulator release 555570.
Simulators on the BlueSteel channel are due to be subject to “some experiments” – one of which apparently involves splitting up the simulators currently on that channel into smaller channels. It is not anticipated that any of these experiments will have any user-visible impact.
Mazidox Linden also indicated that the LeTigre deployment channel may also be subject to being split into smaller channels, although this has yet to be confirmed.
The aim of this work is to hopefully to make it easier to tune groups of simulators for better performance on their underlying servers, with Oz Linden noting:
We have many more possible system types than we had before… we picked one for the initial uplift, but there are lots of others and many configuration options…. finding the best combinations requires lots of experimentation.
SL Viewer
The Simplified Cache viewer, which incorporates a replacement for VFS caching, was promoted to Release Candidate status on Tuesday, February, 16th, 2021 with the issuing of version 6.4.13.555641.
The rest of the current pipelines remain as:
- Current release viewer Dawa Maintenance RC Viewer, version 6.4.12.555248, dated January 25, 2021, promoted February 1st, 2021 – NEW.
- Release channel cohorts:
- Project Jelly viewer (Jellydoll updates), version 6.4.13.555567, February 5, 2021.
- Custom Key Mappings project viewer, version 6.4.12.553437, January 7, 2021.
- Project viewers:
- Love Me Render (LMR) 5 project viewer, version 6.4.12.553511, issued on January 7, 2021.
- Legacy Profiles viewer, version 6.4.11.550519, October 26.
- 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.
- 360 Snapshot project viewer, version 6.2.4.529111, July 16, 2019.
In Brief
What does it look like when Second Life is lagging (or otherwise performing poorly) for you. What does it look like when Second Life is performing well?
This rather open question was asked by Mazidox Linden in an attempt to gain as wide a view as possible response – be it about “lag” that might be more directly attributable to viewer-side activities (e.g. rezzing / rendering, which are down to the viewer and may be using data already locally cached), or which are dependent on network connectivity or which may be attributable to definable viewer / server interactions (e.g. drops in general performance when the viewer receives the data relating to an avatar arriving in a region, slow script processing, etc.). From this, it is hoped a more detailed breakdown of server-side impacts for which metrics can be obtained can be drawn up.
It has been noted that some timing appear to be “off”. Examples include: landmarks failing to refresh, SLurl failing to copy correctly, through to issues of attachment load with RLV that sees the latter engage before all of the former have properly loaded in the viewer). LL are not aware of any Uplift changes that may have caused this (although some – such as the RLV issue were known to exist prior to Uplift).
Land Store – the recent Land Store issues (non-availability of new regions) appears to be down to assumptions made prior to Uplift that “didn’t hold up”, resulting in the need for a back-end bug fix. In the meantime, regions can be obtained by filing a ticket with Support.
The next SUG meeting – Tuesday, February 23rd – will be a farewell party for Oz Linden, who is retiring from the Lab on Friday, February 26th – see: Oz Linden announces his forthcoming departure from Linden Lab.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 