Remember when...?

[Josh Susanto]

http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/16643492

http://www.metaversejournal.com/2011/08/15/linden-lab-ceo-were-growing-but-were-not-sure-why/

[Charolotte Caxton]

[Josh Susanto]

Thanks to responding to my request before I deleted it.

Is that sound bite for sale?

[Charolotte Caxton]

I sent you it inworld.

At least I think I did, you may have to request a redelivery.

[Josh Susanto]

YES.

THANK YOU.

[Charolotte Caxton]

 

[Dartagan Shepherd]

I tried to watch those again. I got as far as how they're trying to make the "user experience" easier with getting people to spend money and how they wanted to streamline the Lindex.

Which is the whole point, want an easier user experience with initial "economic participation"? Nix the Lindex completely and move to fixed rate purchases/cashouts for L$. Wouldn't that be oh.... easier, faster, funner (and cheaper)?

It's a shopping cart. There's a time to get algorithmic and metric on a problem, and then there are pretty straightforward projects like building a shopping cart with an integrated delivery system in a "game". Will say it again, less people that think stuff up and more people that roll up their sleeves, stop overthinking and just do the basics of producing stable software and not turning into rocket science.

LL could do without 4 of those people on the 5 person panel.

On the other hand, if I were as into buzz words as I was in the 1970's, I would be extremely aroused.

Less think, more do.

[Josh Susanto]

I would say more do, with or without the think.

Its not the thinking that's the problem; just the lack of doing, for which I guess the thinking seems to be used as some kind of excuse.

As long as I'm still not banned again, let me just squeeze in the fact that my store is showing almost 100 fewer items than it did an hour ago, and all my boxes seem to be working correctly.

How is this happening?

And, more importantly, why does it KEEP happening?

If I wanted items delisted (and deleted) I could certainly delist them myself.

And considering that it's still impossible for me to get anything permanently off my unassociated inventory list, I would think it shouldn't be so easy for stuff to just up and disappear from the SLM, from my boxes, and also (at least temporarily, yes, the same items) from my inventory, without even leaving a trace. 

But as they say in the video, things really are not at all broken in August 2011, so I can see why it was necessary to fix them the way we have them fixed now.

This IS an improvement for someone or it wouldn't just be continuing.

So for whom is it an improvement?

 

[Czari Zenovka]

---

Josh Susanto wrote:

 

As long as I'm still not banned again, let me just squeeze in the fact that my store is showing almost 100 fewer items than it did an hour ago, and all my boxes seem to be working correctly.

How is this happening?

And, more importantly, why does it KEEP happening?

If I wanted items delisted (and deleted) I could certainly delist them myself.

And considering that it's still impossible for me to get anything permanently off my unassociated inventory list, I would think it shouldn't be so easy for stuff to just up and disappear from the SLM, from my boxes, and also (at least temporarily, yes, the same items) from my inventory, without even leaving a trace. 

 

---

Ok, that's scary, and right up there with Toy's 6 items being "magically" transferred to DD, except he still has his items....and you have disappearing items from the MP???  If I understand you correctly, the items are still in your MBs but have been delisted or deleted?

Still haven't sold anything since Monday.  Hope it's just a sales slump, but who knows.

[Josh Susanto]

It's happened before, and it tends to clear up eventually.

Basically, an item fails to show up in my store (I was down to 933 from 1017 last night), so I check to make sure it's in one of my boxes, but that doesn't do me much good if the box doesn't show any sign of malfunction.

So I figure I can just drop it in one of the other boxes and delete the nonlisting version if SLM decides to show me the listing again one way or another, at some point.

So then I go to get another one from my inventory and ... IT JUST ISN'T THERE, EITHER.

What are the chances these would be the same items?

And when they DO turn up again in inventory, guess what... they've magically relisted themselves on SLM, too. 

I also just had another brand-new permissions failure today on an item that I've already been selling with no problem.

I coudn't get the item in the box to take more than one permissions correction before that whole thing basically locked up, and the item had (um, "coincidentally") vanished from my personal inventory. All permission had been shut off of the sculpt map, too, which makes zero sense, since they begin in default with more than that anyway.

As always, the problem eventually cleared up.

But it's a cluster of concurrent problems that one should think would never be related unless there's something intentional behind the whole pattern. 

At what point would it stop being wrong to take this kind of thing sort of personally?

More importantly, how often is this happening while I'm not even logged on to observe it?

How many of the weird gaps in sales activity might just be gaps in SLM listing continuity?

 

[Darrius Gothly]

Josh, I recognize this problem .. and its cause. It is related to the Asset Server Farm and related lag issues. When your Viewer or any other "Daemon" (computer process) on SL tries to retrieve information about a certain object, it uses the UUID and requests a complete set of data about that object from the Asset Server Farm. Keep in mind that there are so many unique individual objects in SL that it takes a massive farm of database servers to hold them all.

So the request goes out and the specific server that actually contains the data for that object eventually replies. But in cases of high load, that reply may take too long and be declared a "Fail" by the requesting process. Thus when you look in personal inventory .. it's "gone". When your Magic Box tries to send the details about the objects inside, it fails retrieving info for that same object and thus it disappears from the Marketplace. That's why it vanishes from both places at the same time.

What you can do to combat the issue is to rez the item, take a copy then put the new copy into a new Magic Box. This creates a unique object separate from the first with its own unique UUID. With luck it will wind up on a separate Asset Server computer inside the Farm too. Now you have two unique copies of the same object stored inside two unique Magic Boxes thus one should always be "close to the surface" when a request is made to update inventory of the MBs. Even though one may temporarily vanish, the other should be there.

Usually .... LOL

[Josh Susanto]

>What you can do to combat the issue is to rez the item, take a copy then put the new copy into a new Magic Box.

That is not a bad suggestion, thanks. But I also immediately thought of it the first time I observed this problem.

>This creates a unique object separate from the first with its own unique UUID.

In principle, this is correct. I get it. That's why I thought it would work, myself.

>With luck it will wind up on a separate Asset Server computer inside the Farm too. 

No luck :-( 

I don't know how they assign things to specific servers, but I guess they're doing it alphabetically or by date, or in some such combination. 

Maybe I need to start putting prefixes on stuff that assures it will go to the least busy server.

Any suggestions with that?

[Darrius Gothly]

---

Josh Susanto wrote:

[snip] ...Maybe I need to start putting prefixes on stuff that assures it will go to the least busy server.

Any suggestions with that?

---

Unfortunately I have no clue how many servers constitue the Asset Server Farm nor how specific Assets are assigned to a specific Server. I can only hope they have an algorithm in place that tries to optimize storage and retrieval of the Assets and in some fashion balances the load across the entire Farm. However it they've used a "Stock" algorithm then it may or may not work effectively for the odd retrieval characteristics of SL Assets.

I think we'd have to shanghai one of their DB Gurus, bind and torture him/her until the information we need spills forth. Heck, we can't even get LL to publish a list of "dirty words" that gets a listing marked as Adult. Getting them to state how they send Assets to Servers is probably many orders of magnitues more difficult.

(psssst ... I have rope and a dark sound-proof place we can use ... *wink*)

[Josh Susanto]

Just for the record, I'd like to state that I do not condone torture.

Of course, it wouldn't actually be my job to do anything about it...

[Couldbe Yue]

I thought all objects were only given an uuid when they were rezzed and when they're taken back into the inventory it's lost (the easiest way is to right click on the item in the inventory and check the uuid - it should be all zeroes).  Scripts, textures, animations etc get a permanent uuid and I gather scripts get a new one each time it changes - but I might be misremembering.

I'd say if you're trying to force a change to an object identifier in the database either a name change or a slight change to the object (new texture, slight resizing), or both, might force it but I'm grasping at straws here.