WolfBaginski Bearsfoot wrote:
For the past month or so, the servers have been afflicted by a bug which appeared to send huge amounts of unwanted data to viewers. It was finally fixed this week, rolling out to all servers. Since then I have seen a general improvement in many aspects of SL, such as texture loading and sim crossing, and I infer that the extra traffic was enough to be pushing the Linden Labs internal network to the limits, and dragging down performance.
Hindsight is wonderful, but I do wonder why there was not a rollback if the extra traffic was having those effects. The whole business, I reckon, was entangled with the Pathfinding and associated new physics, and i cannot rid myself of the thought that Pointy-Haired Linden was pushing hard to get that deployed, without adequate allowance for the size of the job, compared to the routine code changes.
The new shiny of the last year has had an erratic delivery. The hassles climaxed with the new Physics needed to support pathfinding, and the rather disruptive test phase. SVC-8206 was my response to that.
I'll settle for a few months of peace, quiet, and bugfixes. Take the time to catch up on the backlog.
And, Oskar, if any of your minions has a bright idea for something new, shut them up. Let's see how the JIRA changes work out before anyone tries to do anything too clever.
You're making the assumption that big, visible, new changes automatically take more work and cause more trouble than fixing small existing problems. Often it's exactly the opposite. You can put all new furniture into a house in an afternoon, but properly fixing a small leak in a basement wall takes time, a backhoe and a major disruption in everyone's life.
I hear a lot of people saying, "Stop making changes! Just fix the bugs!" Well, to fix bugs you have to make changes, often to things that have been around for years and never worked properly in the first place, and often with extremely complicated dependencies that aren't always obvious.
You're also assuming the bandwidth problem was connected to pathfinding because it came out at the same time as pathfinding, when pathfinding itself was running without bandwidth issues both before and after the period of SVC-8124. There are also frequent security-related changes that tend to get sent out as quickly as possible with little publicity or public testing because they don't want the exploits to be known. The LIndens said in so many words in various server meetings that one of the reasons that the pathfnding release coudn't be rolled back was because there were also security changes in it. I believe it was a security change that caused the issues with rezzing objects on small lots earlier this year.
I'm not saying the way the Lab runs server changes is perfect by any means, but I've been using computer applications for a very long time and I don't see things being worse here than with any other complicated system. I used to be heavily into the Sims games and would always eagerly go out and get each expansion pack - AFTER at least the first patch for each one was released, because I knew that the initial release would inevitably be full of small problems. If you think that games are somehow worse than "serious" applications I hope you never use anything like Autocad 13 or (shudder) Vectorworks 12.
