The thread refers to the SLS Main channel being on simulator release 533895. However:
Following restarts, it appears that simulators on the Main channel (and some on RC channels) have remained on 2019-12-04T20:29:26.533447, which according to previous deployment threads, was the last formal deployment to the Main channel.
According to the release note page, 533895 was deployed on December 19th, but has channel names are now obfuscated, it is not clear which RC received the update.
The thread refer to restarts on the RC channels on Wednesday, January 8th, some RC servers should be restarted, but again without any deployment – although the 533895 version number is given for some when it should perhaps be 53447.
Simulator Issues
Restart Issues
The Tuesday, January 7th restarts were repeated a number of times, for reasons Simon Linden explained:
So we haven’t had any server updates since mid-December. Today we restarted a bunch because that can help performance, and in the middle of that we uncovered a bug that’s been lurking there for months, so it got a bit exciting.
Mazidox Linden added that – as of the time of writing this update – further restarts could not be ruled out.
The bug itself was related to at least one directory required by the Mono compiler not being created correctly, preventing scripts from being saved. It is apparently a bug that has been around for some time, but only surfaced as a result of changes to the way simulator restarts are run. Ironically, the changes were intended to make simulator restarts faster and smoother
Holiday Issues
Numerous region holders reported significant performance issues over the holiday period. According to Grumpity Linden, part of the issue was a failure with an automated tool, itself something of a workaround for dealing with simulator performance issues:
Hi all! I was really hoping my first post of the new year would be more jolly, but here we are. Happy New Year, though!
For a couple of years now, we’ve had automated tools, aptly named “Grid Poking Bot” (GPB for short) responsible for doing region restarts, and this has been working quite well – most of the time. Very unfortunately, there was a problem with the GPB over the holidays, and due to a combination of events, it took us much too long to notice – and we finally caught it in part thanks to this very forum thread and a certain vigilant “Spray Can”. We’re now actively pursuing the least disruptive ways to address this problem as quickly as possible. We’ll have a more detailed post-mortem blog in a couple of days as well.
We’re very sorry about souring your holidays.
It’s possible there is more than one issue causing problems, and investigations are still in progress, including the distribution of poorly-performing regions (e.g. are they on their own on the grid, do they have neighbours) as well as looking at distribution by server.
SL Viewer
There have been no viewer updates to mark the start of the week, leaving the current pipelines as follows:
Current Release version 6.3.5.533275, formerly the Wassail RC viewer, dated December 4th, promoted December 12th – No change.
Xanté Maintenance RC viewer, version 6.3.6.533748, December 19th.
Love Me Render RC viewer, version 6.3.5.533347, December 5th.
EEP RC viewer, version 6.4.0.532771, November 20th.
Project viewers:
Copy / Paste viewer, version 6.3.5.533365, December 9th.
Project Muscadine (Animesh follow-on) project viewer, version 6.4.0.532999, November 22nd.
Legacy Profiles viewer, version 6.3.2.530836, September 17th. Covers the re-integration of Viewer Profiles.
360 Snapshot project viewer, version 6.2.4.529111, July 16th.
Destination Guide
Not strictly part of the engineering team’s remit, but it has been reported the Destination Guide is giving errors when trying to submit new destinations. This has been seen by the Web Team, and is apparently being looked at.
Each year through this blog I attempt to track news about, and changes to, Second Life, as driven by Linden Lab. On the technical side, this is do through my weekly SL project summaries, whilst news and general updates are drawn from sources such as Lab comments on the official forums and official blog posts or as a result of attending public meetings and Q&A sessions, etc.
As a lot can happen during the course of the year, so in this article I’ve tried to summarise the more notable updates to occur during the course of 2019.
Unfortunately, these auctions had to be suspended in October / November 2019 due to unspecified “abuse” by users. The system is to be revised, but there is currently no indication of when the auctions will be re-enabled.
Premium Homes
The first styles of the new Premium Homes were unveiled at the annual Home and Garden Expo in March 2019 in a single “preview” region that provided both the four types of Traditional homes and four types of Houseboat that would be the first of the Premium Homes themes that would be issued.
The Homes themselves launched on April 15th, 2019, with the opening of the new Bellisseria continent and a mass release of both Houseboats and Traditional homes. As with the original Linden Homes, they are available through Premium member’s Land Homes page, accessed through their secondlife.com dashboard.
The new Linden Homes are available to Premium members through the existing Linden Homes registration page
The first mass release of houses and houseboats had been snatched up within 48 hours of the release, with the houseboats proving particularly popular – so much so, that the Lab immediately started planning a 709-parcel add-on to Bellisseria specifically to meet the demand. In the meantime, one of the points noted about the new region was its lack of airstrips and this was addressed with the opening of the continent’s first airstrip in late April 2019.
The new bolt-on for the houseboats opened on May 15th, 2019 – and were all gone within 27 minutes of the release. Then in June 2019, Patch Linden announced that releases would shift to a smaller-scale rolling basis with regions of new houses generally being made available on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.
Also in June, the Lab previewed the next major theme for Linden Homes, the Trailers and Campers, which were introduced in September. In December 2019, the Lab previewed and then released the Victorian theme of Premium Homes.
From June 2rd, 2019 Private region tiers changed as follows:
Full regions were reduced from L$249 a month to US $229.
Homestead private regions were reduced from US $195 to US $179.
The changes to Premium fees, announced in June 2019. Source: Linden Lab
These changes were exclusive of VAT, where applicable, and did not apply to Skilled Gaming region; however, Education / Non-profit (EDU/NP) discounted Full islands were be re-priced to maintain their 50% discount off the regularly priced Full island fees.
From June 24th, 2019, Premium fees were increased for the first time in their history:
The monthly fee increased from US $9.50 to US $11.99 (an annual increase of 26.21% from US $114 pa to US $143.88 pa)
The quarterly subscription increased from US $22.50 to US $32.97 (an annual increase of 46.53% a year from US $90 pa to US $131.88 pa). This fee was to be discontinued to users upgrading to Premium after July 24th, 2019, but a later decision saw it continued on a “temporary” basis that means it is still currently available.
The annual fee increased from US $72 to US $99 (an annual increase of 37.5%).
In addition, both existing quarterly and monthly subscriptions would again be subject to VAT.
Note: included with the announcement were proposed changes to Basic account users available off-line IMs and total group allowance. However, after receiving wide-ranging feedback (such as this letter from myself), the decision was made to not implement the group changes.
To help sweeten the Premium fees increase, between June 3rd through June 24th, Premium users were offered the chance to “lock-in” their Premium fee for an additional period commensurate to their subscription period from the end of their existing period. In addition, existing annual Premium subscription members were offered the chance to renew their subscription for an additional year from their next renewal date at the Winter Premium discounted rate (10% off).
There was also the 5% increase in Marketplace commission fees which caused some consternation. While the reason for the increase is understandable when put in the proper perspective, it could have been framed a little better.
Account Changes
In July Linden Lab announced that as from August 1st., their subsidiary company, Tilia Inc., would be taking over all responsibility for managing SL user’s USD denominated accounts. In short, this meant that anyone with a US dollar balance on their account would have to agree to the Tilia Terms of Service and Privacy Policy, and in order to process USD amounts out of Second Life, might have to supply personal information to Tilia. See:
The early part of 2019 was marked by users experiencing a significant number of teleport disconnects. These proved problematic for the Lab as well,with assorted causes from EEP deployments to server OS updates being suggested as a possible cause. A series of user-involved stress tests on the best (Aditi) grid to help with investigations, allowing adjustments to be made on the simulator side. These helped point towards a race condition, with LL implementing changes and updated monitoring to counter the issue.
Script Processing Changes
Over the course of the year, number of script-related issues have surfaced:
Issues following simulator deployments and restarts (see BUG-227688 and BUG-227897) which are still under investigation.
Script performance on Mainland regions sharply declining following a restart to a point where only around 20% or so of scripts are running per cycle, and the simulator has no spare time, forcing the region holder to submit a ticket requesting a move to a different server as a temporary fix.
As a result, LL has worked to improve script handling – such as adjusting how idle scripts are handled to reduce the overhead with place on CPU cycles – and these changes and adjustments have helped to eliminate some, but not all, of the problems encountered through the year.
Purchase notifications for merchants were introduced (providing details on item purchased, amount received and who made the purchase).
Release Notes
In May 2019, the Lab introduced new web-based release notes for the official viewer, together with a index page for said release notes. There were some initial teething problems with the system for those who track official viewer releases (sometimes a viewer update would appear on the index page, sometimes on the new Alternate Viewers page, sometimes on both that took a while to smooth out.
Server release notes made a similar move to web pages in September. After this, LL stopped breaking down simulator updates by release channel (e.g. BlueSteel, Magnum and LeTigre), listing all releases as “Second Life Server”, regardless of the actual channel used for a release.
iOS Client
In January, evidence surfaced that Linden Lab are working on a Second Life iOS. After enquiring with the Lab, I received confirmation the app was being actively worked on. As the year progressed, more details were revealed about the app, including: the app should work on both the iPhone and iPad, and will initially be more of a communicator / companion app than a fully-rounded client; it will provide a log-in option, and chat options (e.g. chat, group chat), but will not present users with an in-world location, or rez and avatar in-world. Over time it will be enhanced – but additional capabilities are still TBD. See my mid-year update for more.
Cloud Transition
Work – most of it transparent to users – has continued on the migration of Second Life to the cloud. Most of this work has been on the back-end services, notably the web services. Currently, no public-facing simulators have been transitioned to AWS provisioning. All of this work has been achieved without any significant disruption to services or – more particularly – without users actually being aware the services had been moved, and the Lab reports that the migrated services have been able to achieve almost 100% up time.
There was no deployment on Tuesday, December 17th, leaving the SLS Main channel and a portion of the RC channel servers on simulator version 2019-12-04T20:29:26.533447, originally deployed on Thursday, December 5th, and comprising:
A build of release 2019-11-15T21:13:13.532828 using new build technology.
Addresses some cases of scripts erroneously stopping.
Fixes a crash.
On Wednesday, December 18th, some RC servers should be updated with server release 2019-12-06T21:03:45.533558, comprising internal fixes. This is a re-deployment of the release originally made on December 9th, 2019, containing “a difference under the hood”.
No Change Window
These deployments are the last scheduled for 2020. Due to the end of year No Change Window (December 20th through to January 2nd, 2020, the next simulator updates will not likely be deployed before Tuesday, January 7th, 2020.
SL Viewer
There have been no viewer updates to mark the start of the week, leaving the current pipelines as follows:
Current Release version 6.3.5.533275, formerly the Wassail RC viewer, dated December 4th, promoted December 1th2 – NEW.
On Tuesday, December 10th, the SLS Main channel was updated to simulator version 2019-12-04T20:29:26.533447, originally deployed on Thursday, December 5th, and comprising:
A build of release 2019-11-15T21:13:13.532828 using new build technology.
Addresses some cases of scripts erroneously stopping.
Fixes a crash.
On Wednesday, December 11th, there should be an RC deployment to the BlueSteel RC. Simulator version 2019-12-06T21:03:45.533558 comprises internal fixes.
Deployment Notes
The Tuesday deployment started a little later than usual.
Further, as some of the processes managing deployments are being modified to increase stability, some deployments may run longer than usual. Once this work has finished, it is hoped deployments will be faster and more stable.
SL Viewer
At the end of week #49, the following viewers were updated:
On December 4th, the Maintenance RC viewer updated to version 6.3.5.533275.
On December 5th, the Love Me Render RC viewer updated to version 6.3.5.533347.
On Monday, December 9th the Copy / Paste project viewer updated to version 6.3.5.533365. The rest of the official viewer pipelines are as follows:
Current Release version 6.3.4.532299, formerly the Ordered Shutdown RC viewer, dated November 4th, – No change.
Release channel cohorts:
EEP RC viewer, version 6.4.0.532771, November 20th.
Project viewers:
Project Muscadine (Animesh follow-on) project viewer, version 6.4.0.532999, November 22nd.
Legacy Profiles viewer, version 6.3.2.530836, September 17th. Covers the re-integration of Viewer Profiles.
360 Snapshot project viewer, version 6.2.4.529111, July 16th.
On Tuesday, 3rd December, the planned Main SLS channel deployment was cancelled. Had it been deployed, it would have comprised server maintenance release 2019-11-19T22:26:38.532992, built with the updated server build tools, and which includes:
Improved crash detection during shut-down.
Fixes for some race conditions with LSL scripts that could cause them to handle the same event more than once during a roll.
Updates to improve simulator security.
The planned RC deployment for Wednesday, December 4th, comprising server update has also been cancelled.
The reasons for the cancellation are related to the return of recent issues with scripts failing until a region is restarted (see BUG-227864) and which has been an intermittent issue recently, with Simon Linden noting:
We originally had planned to update the main channel regions with the version that’s on the RC channels, but held off as we are looking into issues about scripts not running. It appears to be an old issue that’s always been there but is worth investigating … we’re trying to get an update together for tomorrow morning [Wednesday, December 4th]. It was a very small percentage [of scripts affected] but that’s enough to be painful when there are millions running.
There is a forum thread concerning simulator overload issues that occurred over the Thanksgiving weekend (see: Huge intermittent sim overload). These issues were further confirmed at the SUG meeting by others seeing similar problems on other regions. Linden Lab do not currently have an explanation for the problems, but Maxidox Linden, one of the Second Life QA team members, did take a moment to address claims in the thread that LL “not caring” about issues like this:
I’m going to let the devs here handle this topic but I just want to chime in that I’ve read that thread and we absolutely do care about issues like this, and don’t put our development time solely into new feature work (I’m the one who tests a bunch of the stability and performance change.
– Mazidox Linden
The discussion on this topic raised questions on the simulator statistic Simulation Time and what it actually records, given it is often tied to simulator issues – as is the case with this issue. Exactly what it records has been a subject of discussion for around the last decade, and came up again in terms of whether it might point to a possible cause. After taking a look, Simon Linden noted:
So I did some digging. “Simulation Time” seems to be a catch-all category that includes odds and ends like dealing with terrain layers, some physics synchronization, parcel info. So not a lot to use tracking this issue down.
SL Viewer
There have been no official viewer updates to mark the start of the week.
On Tuesday, 26th November, servers on the Main SLS channel were updated with server maintenance release 2019-11-15T21:13:13.532828, previously deployed to a release candidate channel. It comprises:
Improves crash detection during shut-down.
Fixes some race conditions with LSL scripts that could cause them to handle the same event more than once during a roll.
Includes updates to improve simulator security.
On Wednesday, 27th November, there should be a single RC deployment 2019-11-19T22:26:38.532992, which is functionally the same build as 532828, but compiled using updated server build tools.
Given the issues with Tuesday deployment (see below) the status of the deployment was in a state of flux at the time of writing.
Tuesday Deployment Issues
The Tuesday server updates required an extended deployment window, together with more restarts of the updated simulators than is usually the case. Given the simulator version had been deployed to RC servers in week #47, the issues encountered with the deployment took LL by surprise:
This is one of those situations where we are left trying to figure out what went so wrong; we don’t know of changes that would have caused this much churn. That is the big difference between our Tuesday and Wednesday updates. Tuesday is more than 2x bigger, and divided up differently. Seeing something happen and knowing why it happened are two completely different things. Given that last week was OK, I suspect it is a scaling problem however.
The real frustration is that there isn’t a good way to test or simulate the scale where the issues happen. Updating one or two servers can be perfectly fine; but then do a few hundred and something goes up in smoke.
– Simon Linden, commenting on the November 26th deployment issues
Currently, the Lab is digging into what may have gone wrong (e.g. by checking server logs, etc.). They have already tracked down what might be a contributing factor, but the overall root cause analysis will take time. However, as the issues appears to be with the deployment process itself rather than the updated simulator code, at this point in time it is unlikely the simulator update will be rolled back.
SL Viewer
The following viewers were updated during the latter half of week #47:
November 22nd:
The Wassail Maintenance RC viewer updated to version 6.3.5.533043.
The Project Muscadine (Animesh follow-on) project viewer, version 6.4.0.532999.
November 20th
The EEP RC viewer updated to version 6.4.0.532771.
The Copy / Paste project version updated to version 6.3.5.532860.
The remainder of the viewers in the current pipelines are as follow:
Current Release version 6.3.4.532299, formerly the Ordered Shutdown RC viewer, dated November 4th, – No Change.
Release channel cohorts:
Maintenance RC viewer, version 6.3.5.532739, November 15th.
EEP RC viewer, version 6.4.0.532314, November 1st.
Love Me Render RC viewer, version 6.3.4.532273, October 31st.
Project viewers:
Legacy Profiles viewer, version 6.3.2.530836, September 17th. Covers the re-integration of Viewer Profiles.
360 Snapshot project viewer, version 6.2.4.529111, July 16th.
Name Changes
There are concerns over how long names might be cached within services, how changes might be tracked by external databases (e.g. customer lists for things like redelivery terminals), etc.
To help ensure user-developed tools, etc., can keep up with Name Changes, Linden Lab plan to offer a REST API (REpresentational State Transfer) that can be used to perform a name<-> avatar key translations and that will always return the same key for any name an account has ever had, and the key will always return the current name.
Creators are again reminded that their products and tools should utilised the avatar agent key, no avatar names.
LSL enquiries on agent key will return the current name for an avatar, not any past name(s).
There was concern that Name Changes could lead to issues in tracking griefers. However, as was pointed out in the meeting:
There are fees associated with Names Changes – signing-up to Premium and then for each change. These are unlikely to find appeal with griefers.
Griefers already create multiple accounts, and this will remain likely remain their preferred means of causing upset.
BUG-216397 “llName2Key, llRequestUserKey both accept a lone “R” as a surname for “Resident” agents” has been raised with the Lab again, and has been marked for inclusion in the next internal maintenance fix for Name Changes.
Once again, a “fee” figure was mentioned at the Simulator User Group meeting (US $20) – but it is important to note this is only a guess on the part of a user, and not any form of statement from Linden Lab. So If you hear it anywhere in the next month or so, ignore it.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 