what happens during a sim restart?

[Nicholas Melchior]

I really just need clrification on a technical point. What exactly happens during a private region restart? I have heard some talk as if it is just a simple power cycling of a server, and I have heard others describe it as if the sim is moved to another server entirely. Are private regions placed on different servers during either a standard maintenance restart or during an owner initiated restart? Thanks.

[Lindal Kidd]

Wow.  Now that's something I never even worried about.  On my own OpenSim regions, which are hosted on my home PC, when I "restart" them, it means that I at least close the simulator program and re-start it.  Or, it may mean I turn off and reboot my PC.

I have no idea what LL does. :smileyembarrassed:

[Dilbert Dilweg]

When you restart a region, it basically restarts the running exe on the server. There are several regions on one hardware host. Private regions can restart their own region at will, and most of the time it will bounce to a new host/server. A lot of times if your private region is running slow. You can restart a couple of times to cause it to bounce, to hopefully a better running server host that may not be loaded down as much with busy regions.. The private regions do get restarted as regular maintenance like mainland

 

[KarenMichelle Lane]

Nicholas,

All sorts of magical things...

It depends on what kind of restart you request.

As an SecondLife Estate Owner and a OSGrid Region Hosting experimenter, I restart my Regions on a regular basis especially after a lot of building and rezzing activity. This seems to clear out accumulated server cache data [queued messages [both queued & stalled delivery], detached avatar accounts [a strange problem where someone can not login because their avatar account is not being automatically logged out], resetting stuck semi-deleted objects and a bunch of other region server related performance.

Sometimes this is not enough since full regions are assigned to a single processor on the server and the other processors on the same server or the server itself may be having issues as well. When a Region Restart doesn't fix a performance issue [and I've done all the other rechecks for region lagging scripts or texture weirdness] I sometimes have to call Premium Support to request a Server restart. This will usually be done after a careful analysis of that server by the LL Support Staff and can take a few minutes to hours to get done.

I've had a LL Staff member acknowledge me a few times where the server itself and/or another region on an other processor on the server was the issue. That kindness made me confident in my Region shooting shooting skills.

As I understand it, the LL Server farms allow for many possible virtual server configurations and your region can be reassigned to a different processor on the same server or a different server all together in the same datacenter.

Back 2 years ago when we owned 6 regions that were next to each other in the grid, we made a request to LL get them all operating in the same datacenter. This was so improve the cross regions transfers for our residents who flew and used facilities on all the regions.