Deploys for the week of 2012-09-03

[Perrie Juran]

Riding my Motorcycle on Mainland last night and today on a public road I had a lot more trouble crossing into Magnum SIM from Main Channel than with other SIM crossings.  A couple of times being thrown into the sky and having to relog.

Also, one of these crossings is at a Southwest corner and looking into the Magnum SIM I believe I still saw the bandwidth problem.  (I'm unclear if the fix is supposed to be in Magnum right now).  Standing there with my draw set at 128, I never saw the bandwidth drop below 600 in the statistics bar.

If you want the specific locations, if you tell me how to share them privately with you, I will. However, because it includes my home SIM I won't post them here because I do not want to make that publicly known.

Thanks

Perrie

ETA:  I also witnessed several of AnneMaries cars having problems at this crossing.

[WolfBaginski Bearsfoot]

I haven't seen similar circumstance while on other channels. But get about twenty people in a region, and a few physical vehicles, and things went gnarly.

At some point, there's no slack in the system any more. And my gut feeling, based on past experience, is that this is happening at a lower load level. And there's plenty of room to argue about what is "expected behaviour". Since I haven't been prompted to do detailed Physics frame-rate tests in the last three years, I don't know how unusual these events might be. I don't know if I have a reliable measurement from the viewer stats window.

I later tested, Le Tigre release channel, a gun that fired bullets doing Linden damage on collision. Normal fps figures for the sim were 43-44 fps. The fps drop varied, a lot, which is why I wonder about the reliability of the Stats window, but firing a shotgun sometimes caused a drop to 21 fps.

That's a case of rezzing and moving a half-dozen simple objects, but, last year I was in a zombie-maze with a shotgun, and while there was a lot of fuss about script load, this sort of thing might have had the same symptoms.

It's an anecdotal gut reaction: the RC code has bust something. I've submitted a bug report. But they only place where people are going to find out about it, and respond to requests for tests, is here.

 

Good luck, Oskar, I think you're going to need it.

[WolfBaginski Bearsfoot]

I've seen a common pattern with vehicles, not just with the new code.

You start a sim crossing, and the view shows a predicted position. The minimap shows you moving. But the location data shows you still in the original sim, with out-of-range position data, and control inputs to the vehicle are dead. It's quite common, and when the sim crossing completes you may get a sudden position and vector change.

So, stuck in Sim A, apparently moving through Sim B, what happens when your poisition enters Sim C? Well, you may see Sim C is the viewer, in glorious 3D, but it never appears on the mini-map and when you hit that boundary, there's a viewer crash.

Eventually the vehicle is returned, and it's sometimes hard to tell which return was which sim-crossing failure. But, a couple of times. it seems that the vehicle went on in a straight line for 10 or 20 regions before it hit a full parcel or other no-access boundary.

It looks to me that the time available to complete the sim crossing depends on the speed and on the distance to the next sim boundary. Which means those near-corner sim-crossings by roads have less margin. There's a terrible junction in the snowlands where three roads meet almost on top of a sim corner. I don't recall one of the four region names, but if you're sailing they have that happen twice, to the north-west of Dex. Thallipoli is one of the region names, or something very like it.

From general observations, sim crossings are taking longer to resolve than in the past, it's not something specific to any new code. The rubber-banding is more obvious, even when walking. There may be a correlation between increased delays and increased user concurrency, but I don't have the information to test that.

In the end, all I can say is avoid, where possible, sim-crossing close to corners, and go as slowly as possible.

The racing sailors must be going through hell.

 

[Perrie Juran]

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WolfBaginski Bearsfoot wrote:

I've seen a common pattern with vehicles, not just with the new code.

You start a sim crossing, and the view shows a predicted position. The minimap shows you moving. But the location data shows you still in the original sim, with out-of-range position data, and control inputs to the vehicle are dead. It's quite common, and when the sim crossing completes you may get a sudden position and vector change.

So, stuck in Sim A, apparently moving through Sim B, what happens when your poisition enters Sim C? Well, you may see Sim C is the viewer, in glorious 3D, but it never appears on the mini-map and when you hit that boundary, there's a viewer crash.

Eventually the vehicle is returned, and it's sometimes hard to tell which return was which sim-crossing failure. But, a couple of times. it seems that the vehicle went on in a straight line for 10 or 20 regions before it hit a full parcel or other no-access boundary.

It looks to me that the time available to complete the sim crossing depends on the speed and on the distance to the next sim boundary. Which means those near-corner sim-crossings by roads have less margin. There's a terrible junction in the snowlands where three roads meet almost on top of a sim corner. I don't recall one of the four region names, but if you're sailing they have that happen twice, to the north-west of Dex. Thallipoli is one of the region names, or something very like it.

From general observations, sim crossings are taking longer to resolve than in the past, it's not something specific to any new code. The rubber-banding is more obvious, even when walking. There may be a correlation between increased delays and increased user concurrency, but I don't have the information to test that.

In the end, all I can say is avoid, where possible, sim-crossing close to corners, and go as slowly as possible.

The racing sailors must be going through hell.

 

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Thank you for all of that and the tips.

The reason I posted here is because the problems I encountered on my ride were worst on a Magnum SIM crossing.  I hadn't looked last night what code the SIM's were on but went back today to try again and look this time.

Also as I stated I had observed AnneMarie's vehicles and while I was there the additional trouble they had crossing into Magnum was very distinct. 

I am use to some turbulence at SIM crossings and know to approach them gingerly.

[Cully Andel]

Got my fingers crossed. I really hope it works this time.

[Darien Caldwell]

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Perrie Juran wrote:

ETA:  I also witnessed several of AnneMaries cars having problems at this crossing.

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Well, at least there was an upside.

[Marianne McCann]

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WolfBaginski Bearsfoot wrote:

Magnum RC channel: I have seen Physics frame rates plummet while vehicles are rezzing and moving in the region, Today it went as low of 0,3 fps.

 

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Saw this issue as well. Really nasty stuff. I did not check it against other servers.

[SisterPrudence]

I haven't seen any physics framerate drop when vehicles are rezzed; I've seen a brief drop in physics framerate when vehicles START moving but it generally pops back up. It may well be worse when several vehicles start moving at the same time.

Vehicle performance has been bad ever since the Pathfinding roll-out (well, strictly speaking since the first vehicle was introduced to Second Life, but it's gotten noticeably worse since Pathfinding) and I don't see anything on the RC channels that makes it look worse than it already was. In fact, things seemed to improve a bit Wednesday night. Promoting the RC code should at least take the bandwidth problem off the table as a variable. Bandwidth doesn't seem to be a problem where all regions are running the RC code.

[Oskar Linden]

There wasn't anything particular about any of the individual RC's this week. We also haven't really touched physics in a while. So any physics related stuff would be on either all regions, or on all RC channels. We do have some upcoming code to help with region crossings. 

The code that is on the RC channels now will be promoted in the AM.

__Oskar