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Region Entry failing: Kuula


arabellajones
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I have just been bouncing off the sim boundary when trying to enter Kuula region

 Error Message: "Second Life: Failed to grant capabilities"

All contents of the region are visible.

Map indicates 10AVs are in the region

Teleport attempts fail with a similar message (in a form I cannot cut-and-paste).

Sim crossings at nearby boundaries succeed with no problems.

Since I cannot get into the sim I cannot tell you which code version it is running on. 

Kuula contains the main NCI facility, one of the places which new residents are invited to go to when they complete orientation.

And according to all the tests I can run, I have a very good connection. I have rebooted my modem. I don't use wifi.

I figure it's time for somebody at Linden Lab to do their job.

 

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arabellajones wrote:

I have just been bouncing off the sim boundary when trying to enter Kuula region

 Error Message: "Second Life: Failed to grant capabilities"

All contents of the region are visible.

Map indicates 10AVs are in the region

Teleport attempts fail with a similar message (in a form I cannot cut-and-paste).

Sim crossings at nearby boundaries succeed with no problems.

Since I cannot get into the sim I cannot tell you which code version it is running on. 

Kuula contains the main NCI facility, one of the places which new residents are invited to go to when they complete orientation.

And according to all the tests I can run, I have a very good connection. I have rebooted my modem. I don't use wifi.

I figure it's time for somebody at Linden Lab to do their job.

 

Kuula's on the Snack RC which is testing the new mesh/texture content delivery system. Right now I'm having no problems with teleporting in and region crossings are smooth as buttah.

Interestingly enough, Mystro Pestro's on Snack too - I'm also having no access issues. However, the "capabilities" system for these regions is different than the typical region because that's one of the things that the RC is testing.

Are you still having problems with these regions, and if so where are connecting from? The new RC is using remote facilites around the world to send mesh and textures and something may be blocking these facilities for you.

 

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Since this is the first I have heard of this, I remain unconvinced. If it needs special settings from my hardware or software, either viewer or firewall, nobody has bothered to tell me. This is either more Linden incompetence, or another "not our problem" response. Why should I trust you?

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arabellajones wrote:

Since this is the first I have heard of this, I remain unconvinced. If it needs special settings from my hardware or software, either viewer or firewall, nobody has bothered to tell me. This is either more Linden incompetence, or another "not our problem" response. Why should I trust you?

You don't have to trust me. You don't have to go to Kuula either.

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There`s 3 regions on RC snack in the blake sea and quite a few more dotted around the grid atm. I`ve not had caps problems with any.

Quote from server beta usergroup:

"No special viewer support required (works with the Second Life 3.7.14 release viewer "

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Server_Beta_User_Group

CDN regions are working just great for me on latest firestorm viewer.

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There's something really broken about that link. I can see the JIRA page is there, but most is covered by apparently unclosable pop-up windows. It may be a browser-related problem, but it looks as though something wants to install software on my computer. New JIRA version seems to be part of it, but my AV software doesn't like it, whatever is going on.

 

 

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Finally got through it: the problem seems to be a badly-scripted pop-up window which blocks scrolling and zooms in so that the bottom half of the pop-up is invisible and the lack of scrolling makes it inaccessible.

Summarising what was going wrong, the Snack RC is a small-scale server-beta test channel, and Kuula was one of a number of very busy regions all put on the same physical hardware, overloading it and leading to problems apparently unrelated to what Snack RC is trying to test: how is something like "About Land" related to texture fetches?

When you cannot get onto the region, there seems to be no way to find out the server version involved.

The Wiki page on the Snack RC is badly out of date: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Beta/Snack

This web page tells us what the Lindens are doing: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Server_Beta_User_Group The Snack RC info describes it as an ongoing test, with no start date given, making it difficult to decide if an ongoing problem of the sort that Kuula has been having is related to the Snack problem.

It looks like several of the commonplace Linden Lab problems, including...

  1. Inadequate documentation maintenance, leading to misinformed users and support staff, all wasting effort on irrelevant dead-end problem solving
  2. A test sample which is clearly unrepresentative of the Grid as a whole, suggesting a wider-scale inadequacy of testing.
  3. The use of a programmer time management system as the primary method for users to report problems.
  4. Depending on certain info about problems which certain problems make it impossible for users to provide.
  5. The general problem of helpdesk systems that it is a temptation to blame any new problem on somebody else. For SL, it always seems to be the "connection", and since my viewer has been reporting sometimes horrible ping times when in a Snack RC region, it can be plausible. (But people were screaming "connection" without even asking what the ping time was reported as.)

 

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You can check that you`re connected to the CDN (which is purely for texture/mesh fetching, apparently taking a big load off the sim) when you`re in RC snack region by typing "ping asset-cdn.agni.lindenlab.com" in windows cmd.exe.

I`ve had pings as low as 12ms on the 30+ snack regions I`ve looked at.

 

Edit :

Ok Monty :matte-motes-bashful: Yes it pings from any region.

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  • Lindens


SaraCarena wrote:

You can check that you`re connected to the CDN (which is purely for texture/mesh fetching, apparently taking a big load off the sim) when you`re in RC snack region by typing "ping asset-cdn.agni.lindenlab.com" in windows cmd.exe.

You'll be able to ping that DNS name whether the viewer is using the CDN or not.  So that really isn't a valid test.  Operationally, we can switch a region back and forth as needed and so any static document will never be 100% reliable.  The grid is the truth.

Using 'netstat', you can get some clues.  Connections to 216/8 port 12046 point at non-CDN.  Connections to port 80 to the CDN service-of-the-moment point to CDN.  (All of this subject to change - it's not a formal declaration of a fixed API.)

 

 

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The last time I did a traceroute, I didn't get off my ISP's network inside 40ms, though my ping times to North America have been consistently 140ms-180ms for the last twenty years.

The CDN approach could make a big difference to me, but I reckon you must be in a very unusual location to get your results.

And I have noticed that a TP into a busy Snack RC sim can lead to some crazy high ping times reported by the viewer. I once saw over 7000ms reported, with some extreme rubber-banding if I made any attempt at movement.

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The 12ms figure came from typing "ping asset-cdn.agni.lindenlab.com" in windows cmd.exe. As far as I know it`s a test to check that you`re connecting to a CDN cache which will deliver textures and mesh instead of the sim doing it providing you`re in a CDN region ( only RC snack channel atm). CDN has set up caches worldwide so you might have one nearer to you than North America. My ping sim (from the statistics bar) is normally 170-200 and I`ve seen some spikes in that too, 700 was the highest.

To quote Monty "The grid is the truth" the best place I`ve found for seeing how well CDN works is Brasil rio coz it`s an island region so you`re not pulling textures from surrounding regions, loads really fast for me there.

There`s one potential downside to CDN which I`ll quote from a blog;

"CDN has several servers in Europe, you may be accessing one that has not been used by an SL resident yet. The first time someone uses a given texture it is actually slower since the CDN server must first get it from LL then pass it on to you."

http://modemworld.wordpress.com/2014/09/30/lab-updates-on-viewer-changes-and-cdn/

 

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I think Wolf was pointing out how amazingly low a 12ms ping time is to anything.

I think I'd rather have a stable 200ms ping time when I enter a new region over over the sort of behavior he reports. I can work with it when I'm flying a plane in SL. An unpredictable multi-second delay is scary-bad. And now I am wondering if my viewer has been deciding it has lost connection with SL because of that. Is the burst of fast traffic messing up other necessary traffic, such as command-and-control signalling?

And I need to check if my ISP knows about this CDN stuff. They makes specific QOS provision for Second Life as something that depends on a high-priority connection. But if they're using IP address blocks, are they seeing the CDN traffic as part of SL?

 

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Can`t answer any of that sorry, why not ping asset-cdn.agni.lindenlab.com and see what response you get? I`m sure that the Lindens would be interested in anyone whose having problems connecting to their local CDN node.

There`s been quite a bit of talk about CDN between third party viewer devs and Lindens during the last three TPV meetings which are posted on youtube. The latest one is;

Skip to the 10th minute for brief news on http viewer and CDN.

As for spikes in ping sim, I`ve seen some on snack regions in blake sea but it`s random not constant so to me not really a biggie. Personally I`m finding that CDN makes for faster texture loading.

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Oh I checked that domain name for ping time. Varied between 35ms and 65ms, depending on time of day, which suggests a CDN node in London rather than some other part of the UK. Tests I've done to other major UK cities don't show that pattern. I don't know how you can get the 12ms you claim.

The Stats window in my viewer is consistently showing 190ms to 220ms ping times, but that's not strictly comparable since the data packet sizes will make a difference.

So CDN should improve things but, as a fancy caching system, there's some potential for it to interact badly with the texture caching done by the viewer. It's a multi-level caching system, and with the cache search times coming into it, the optimum cache size for the viewer cache may be different.

The Lindens may be doing something rather new and clever: SL has so much user-provided content that experience with CDN tech in other "games" may be misleading. And, over the years, the idea of a Linden doing something new and clever has lost its appeal.

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Pinging cds.y8a2h6u5.hwcdn.net [205.185.216.42] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 205.185.216.42: bytes=32 time=14ms TTL=55
Reply from 205.185.216.42: bytes=32 time=12ms TTL=55
Reply from 205.185.216.42: bytes=32 time=15ms TTL=55
Reply from 205.185.216.42: bytes=32 time=14ms TTL=55

Ping statistics for 205.185.216.42:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 12ms, Maximum = 15ms, Average = 13ms

Well I just look at a few numbers now and again when I wear my geeky hat:matte-motes-nerdy: , don`t pretend to know what they all mean and try to keep up with new developments in sl. Yes there is a node in London and there`s diagram diagram of the CDN network on Inara Preys excellent blog.

http://modemworld.wordpress.com/tag/cdn/

I`m just looking forward to the http pipeline viewer now :smileyhappy:

/me jumps out of this thread, have fun! :smileyhappy:

 

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I have read that JIRA entry, and the comment that explains the problem, but I am not at all sure that RC Snack has escaped the cause. I suspect it still has a high proportion of regions that are known to get very busy. Some of the problems have returned with the weekend, and when I did a check on busy regions I kept hitting places on RC Snack. When about half the very-busy places I visited are on RC Snack, just eyeballing the map for green dots suggests the channel is still being misapplied. If you were rolling a dice and getting this sort of result, you'd be wondering if it were loaded.

(I only stacked the deck of cards for the one Poker game at school...)

 

 

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Kuula was very bad on Sunday, the server apparently crashing rather often, though restarting quickly.

One very obvious check would be to take if off the Snack RC. That wouldn't tell you if the problem was the Snack RC code, or the overloaded hardware that Maestro only reported in the BUG-7444 Jira entry.

Or is that too obvious?

 

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