Deploys for the week of 2013-03-04 (Updated @ 2013-03-05 11:30PST)

[Maestro Linden]

This week in server releases is action-packed, with an update to the main channel and 3 new projects for RC.

 

Second Life Server (main channel)

The main channel is getting the server maintenance project that was on all three RC channels last week.  This project onloy contains a fix to a single crash mode.

https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Release_Notes/Second_Life_Server/13#13.02.21.270686

Scheduled Tuesday 2013-03-05 05:00-12:00 PST

 

Second Life RC BlueSteel:

BlueSteel is getting a new server maintenance project, which fixes a fairly common crash mode.

https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Release_Notes/Second_Life_RC_BlueSteel/13#13.03.04.271245

Slight change of plans - BlueSteel will be getting the same object rez project as LeTigre.  https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Release_Notes/Second_Life_RC_BlueSteel/13#13.03.04.271238

Scheduled Wednesday 2013-03-06 07:00-11:00 PST

 

Second Life RC LeTigre:

LeTigre is getting a new project, which aims to improve overall sim performance when objects are being rezzed.

https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Release_Notes/Second_Life_RC_LeTigre/13#13.03.04.271238

Scheduled Wednesday 2013-03-06 07:00-11:00 PST

 

Second Life RC Magnum:

Magnum is getting a second new server maintenance project, which includes a mix of bug fixes and stability improvements.

https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Release_Notes/Second_Life_RC_Magnum/13#13.03.01.271119

Scheduled Wednesday 2013-03-06 07:00-11:00 PST

 

We will be monitoring this thread as the code gets released, so feel free to note any observations you have about the server updates.  If you have a specific bug you'd like to report, please file a Jira. 

[dd Temin]

Sim crossings in most  flying vehicles is now totally  broken on agni servers after todays server update  !!!

Total loss of control on every sim crossing  for minutes usually resulting in avatar needing to relog.

It seems    the dynamic camera  control  get broken in viewer  at sim crossings  and the Avatar gets unseated or looses its animation.

the Air craft   goes out of view........... but is actually continuing to fly  until it goes off world or  is stopped by a sim edge or   object on ground. The pilot  cant see  the aircraft..

Maestro....we have been telling  you  about   this for several weeks  since is started in Magnum server sims........and   LL just keeps rolling out  totaly broken server updates...  :matte-motes-angry:

This is going to cause  havok  for all aircraft builders.....customers  angry that the airplane they purchased for  1000's of Lindens   crashes on every sim crossing  !!!!  

 

 

 

 

[Marianne McCann]

---

dd Temin wrote:

Sim crossings in most  flying vehicles is now totally  broken on agni servers after todays server update  !!!

 

---

I've not seen this experience at all while flying today. That said, I have heard an increase of frustration from a lot of plane users, which makes me wonder what is at issue here. 

[WolfBaginski Bearsfoot]

It's not directly linked to the new code, I haven't yet done a test, but I can confirm that misplaced sits on sim-crossing have been affecting ground vehicles too. Also, camera displacement and very prolonged sim crossings. It's consistent with the patterns I reported when the threaded code went grid-wide. The process doesn't fail so often, but there can be a prolonged period of controlled displacement and pitch/roll/yaw before the process completes with a jump back to the vicinity of the original crossing point.

It occurs to me that one possible cause for all this is lousy network communication between sims.

Some of this may be down to interpolation by the Viewer. There is an option to turn Interpolation off (Advanced menu?) which means the vehicle just freezes at the region boundary until the sim-crossing process completes.

Some of these sim-crossing problems became worse when Pathfinding was released. I know that it isn't particularly linked to the use of Mesh. From my own experience, I cannot avoid the feeling that I am wasting my time when I report these obvious faults: the Lindens never seem to listen.

Mesh still feels like an incomplete project. Pathfinding caused us much grief, and seems largely unused. I'm finding it difficult to have confidence that any new project will be worth the hassle.

Threaded region crossing isn't worthless, but even just walking around, it is obvious that there are huge unresolved problems. It might not all be under the control of Linden Labs. Maybe design choices at the core of how SL works just will not work any more on the modern Internet.

Viewer 2 did give us a reworking of the Viewer code. Has any rewrite on the same scale ever happened with the sim server?

[Ayesha Askham]

@Maestro and dd (and Wolf, who "knows about these things")

Is it possible that the "Interest List" changes that Andrew has been heading up could have any bearing on these issues?  I ask because "In-sim" performance on a racetrack (Amber Skyline) has noticeably changed in recent weeks, and NOT for the better.  The coincidence seems remarkable seeing as other unexpected and unwanted effects have definitely been seen.

[Atashi Toshihiko]

For what it's worth, I started noticing a lot of these sorts of issues when the 'interest list' project was introduced to the Magnum RC regions. My home is in a Magnum region, and what had been a relatively stable and enjoyable Second Life turned to a lot of frustration in January when the interest list was introduced in testing.

I made one attempt at doing a Jira about just one of the issues, but LL shot it down and said it was the viewer's fault (I use a tpv because the official client is unusably slow for me) and the tpv creator shot it down because he said it was LL's fault.

Cheers

 

[WolfBaginski Bearsfoot]

Ayesha, you flatter me. I am but a bear of very little brain.

 

[Maestro Linden]

---

dd Temin wrote:

Sim crossings in most  flying vehicles is now totally  broken on agni servers after todays server update  !!!

Total loss of control on every sim crossing  for minutes usually resulting in avatar needing to relog.

It seems    the dynamic camera  control  get broken in viewer  at sim crossings  and the Avatar gets unseated or looses its animation.

the Air craft   goes out of view........... but is actually continuing to fly  until it goes off world or  is stopped by a sim edge or   object on ground. The pilot  cant see  the aircraft..

Maestro....we have been telling  you  about   this for several weeks  since is started in Magnum server sims........and   LL just keeps rolling out  totaly broken server updates...  :matte-motes-angry:

This is going to cause  havok  for all aircraft builders.....customers  angry that the airplane they purchased for  1000's of Lindens   crashes on every sim crossing  !!!!  

 

 

 

 

---

Hi dd, as I say in my post every week, you should file a Jira about specific issues.  Luckily, somebody else (Aeon Voom) has filed BUG-1814 about this issue.

[Maestro Linden]

Wolfbaginski, Ayesha, Atashi: yes, the issue does appear to be related to the interest list changes.  It seems that after some sim crossings, a vehicle's passenger won't have the vehicle in their interest list.  The result is that the viewer doesn't get any object updates about the vehicle, and instead extrapolates the velocity of it by default.

For some reason airplanes seem to be most affected - this might be caused by the high speeds (relative to other vehicle types), or possibly elevation.  I read a suggestion that selecting the vehicle fixes causes object updates to happen again - this makes sense for an interest list bug, since selected objects are treated specially in the interest list.

[dd Temin]

Maestro....  Thanks  for letting us know  that  the sim Crossing issue for  flying vehicles has now been officially recognized and that  LL has some ideas about what went wrong. All residents in the flying and aircraft community are looking  forward to this being resolved as quickly as possible .  Will the fix be identified as BUG-1814 fix  or ??? 

Thanks again for responding to this issue  :matte-motes-smile:

Is there any place/link where we can see the  BUG-1814 jira submitted by Aeon Voom?

[Maestro Linden]

---

dd Temin wrote:

Maestro....  Thanks  for letting us know  that  the sim Crossing issue for  flying vehicles has now been officially recognized and that  LL has some ideas about what went wrong. All residents in the flying and aircraft community are looking  forward to this being resolved as quickly as possible .  Will the fix be identified as

BUG-1814

fix  or ??? 

Thanks again for responding to this issue  :matte-motes-smile:

Is there any place/link where we can see the 

BUG-1814

jira submitted by Aeon Voom?

---

Yes, I expect a fix will be tagged with BUG-1814 in the release notes.  Unfortunately, there's no way for most people to view the Jira itself, though.

 

 

 

[Willow Wilder]

Hello Maestro,

The following happens while located on a Magnum region. I IM with several viewer users (not friends) over the course of a day from my home on a Magnum region. Each post by *me* in a IM is followed by "Second Life: User not online - message will be stored and delivered later."  The person I am IMing with does not see this (unless they are located on a Magnum region as well). 

This does not happen on SL and BlueSteel servers, nor LeTigre.

I do not hide my online status in any way. 

Thank you. 

https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/BUG-1884

[Dora Gustafson]

Framerate below 10 and crashing in Magnum

OpenGL message "Lost connection"

Second Life 3.4.3 (268262) Dec 17 2012 12:23:54 (Second Life Release)
Release Notes

You are at 262,377.0, 244,655.0, 0.9 in Magnum Sandbox 4 located at  (216.82.45.10:13005)
Second Life RC Magnum 13.03.01.271119
Retrieving...

CPU: Intel® Core i7-2600 CPU @ 3.40GHz (3392.38 MHz)
Memory: 8174 MB
OS Version: Microsoft Windows 7 64-bit Service Pack 1 (Build 7601)
Graphics Card Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
Graphics Card: GeForce GTX 460/PCIe/SSE2

Windows Graphics Driver Version: 9.18.0013.0697
OpenGL Version: 4.2.0

libcurl Version: libcurl/7.21.1 OpenSSL/0.9.8q zlib/1.2.5 c-ares/1.7.1
J2C Decoder Version: KDU v7.0
Audio Driver Version: FMOD version 3.750000
Qt Webkit Version: 4.7.1 (version number hard-coded)
Voice Server Version: Not Connected
Built with MSVC version 1600
Packets Lost: 0/4,447 (0.0%)

:smileysurprised::smileyvery-happy:

[Ayesha Askham]

Dora

Something that I noticed straightaway but may not be relevant:

Your GPU driver 306.97 is way out of date, nVidia are on 314.06 now.  That "may" make a difference.  I spent about 80 minutes on a Magnum sim last night and had no problems.

Aside from the driver, your system is all but identical to mine, though I have more RAM and a GTX580.

[Cerise Sorbet]

---

Dora Gustafson wrote:

Framerate below 10 and crashing in Magnum

OpenGL message "Lost connection"

 

---

That smells likie griffer content, or an experimental build gone bad. There are lots of nasty little objects in circulation that can crash graphics drivers.

[Perrie Juran]

---

Cerise Sorbet wrote:

---

Dora Gustafson wrote:

Framerate below 10 and crashing in Magnum

OpenGL message "Lost connection"

 

---

That smells likie griffer content, or an experimental build gone bad. There are lots of nasty little objects in circulation that can crash graphics drivers.

---

I can't account for the 10FPS but I have been having the "lost connection' crash issue to.

It had gone away after the last driver update from Nvidia and has only just returned the past couple of days.  I have not been able to decipher a common denominator/cause when it happens.

It has been generating an error report (to LL) which I have been sending when it occurs.

[Maestro Linden]

Hi Dora, I would recommend using a newer viewer.  3.4.3 is out of date - you can get the latest viewer (currently 3.4.5 in the release channel) at http://get.secondlife.com.

[Dora Gustafson]

Updating, updating, updating...

Second Life 3.4.5 (270263) Feb 12 2013 04:43:00 (Second Life Release)
Release Notes

You are at 262,163.0, 244,731.0, 22.8 in Magnum Sandbox 4 located at  (216.82.45.10:13005)
Second Life RC Magnum 13.03.01.271119
Error fetching server release notes URL.

CPU: Intel® Core i7-2600 CPU @ 3.40GHz (3392.37 MHz)
Memory: 8174 MB
OS Version: Microsoft Windows 7 64-bit Service Pack 1 (Build 7601)
Graphics Card Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
Graphics Card: GeForce GTX 460/PCIe/SSE2

Windows Graphics Driver Version: 9.18.0013.1407
OpenGL Version: 4.2.0

libcurl Version: libcurl/7.21.1 OpenSSL/0.9.8q zlib/1.2.5 c-ares/1.7.1
J2C Decoder Version: KDU v7.0
Audio Driver Version: FMOD version 3.750000
Qt Webkit Version: 4.7.1 (version number hard-coded)
Voice Server Version: Not Connected
Built with MSVC version 1600
Packets Lost: 101/27,791 (0.4%)

Looking good!!!

Thank you for letting me know I was far behind in viewer version and in graphic driver version

:smileysurprised::smileyvery-happy:

[Dori Helstein]

Am not technically savvy about the servers.  But about two weeks ago  sim crossings have become impossible for the watersims.  My sailboats and motorboats are equally effected in ways similar to the air ships.  So, in fact, is the avi when it flies and crosses a sim.  I am on the SL Viewer and have also Firestorm, problems persist regardless of viewers.  When approaching a sim, either by vehicle or flying, nothing rezzes.  The radar map shows black but the make shows a sim.  If you wait several seconds you may be lucky and see the sim rezz.  If so it shows on the radar map.  Cross at your own risk because even if you cross your boat or your avi gets thrown out of the area.  Today I tried again and once thrown out I was unable to tp to any sim, including my home.  I am now literally trapped on my island, paying high tier and unable to use the game.  And yes, I keep my draw distance low and have a great graphics card.  The experience in the past two weeks in SL has been so poor that it isn't worth logging on much any more.  Am a resident for 4 years, so am use to and welcome changes, but the sim crossing issue is very serious.  Hope Linden addresses it as a priority. 

[Jadeclaw Denfu]

Same here, when trying to cross from Zephyr into Velda, Velda doesn't rezz most of the time,
sometimes waiting works, or one has to go around and go in from another side.
(Independend of the viewer)

Plus rubberbanding till kingdom come. And Logouts as a consequence.

And that old 'Diagonal Sim not rezzing'-Error is back as well.

@Maestro Linden: How about fixing these longtime issues instead of constantly rolling out new broken stuff?

This weeks rollout was a serious b0rkfest.

 

[Ayesha Askham]

Maestro

I know it is unlikely that a Linden will see this until Monday, but nevertheless, this issue with physics spiking really does need to be addressed.

Whether the issue is related to the sim-crossing issues referred to above or not I do not know.

As I reported for the last three or so restarts we have had spikes of 0.1FPS or less lasting up to 15 seconds on LeTigre RC (Woods of Heaven) in the hours after a restart.  Now I am seeing them, granted less severe in nature but very damaging, while attempting fast laps in a Mesh Haru Motors car at Amber ( Amber Skyline Raceway) which is Main Server.  Now these spikes totally disrupt any physical moving vehicle and can end up flipping it anywhere on the sim (or even offworld once).

I cannot help but think that there is some undesireable interraction occurring between the "Interest List" code and Dynamic Pathfinding, or the way a sim handles physical objects.

Whatever the cause, this matter is serious and demands attention.

[Pamela Galli]

My store has four sims, and the crossings for them have become terrible -- my customers and I go sailing into the sunset every time we move from one part of the store to the other.

[WolfBaginski Bearsfoot]

This is pretty much what I am seeing.

My last test run involved 16 sim crossings. 4 of them went severely wrong. rubberbanding by at least one sim-width, followed by a prolonged pause before the vehicle went back to somewhere on the offending sim-boundary, with camera and avatar sit displaced from vehicle settings. Every crossing had some rubberbanding, and there was rubberbanding within every sim.

I had draw distance set to 32m, which can be a bit short for driving. On three occasions the prim road never appeared before I had passed over it, although the physics engine knew that something was there.

In most of the regions, my Avatar was the only one there, suggesting that none of the glitches were incidental to the actions of other avatars.

On at least two occasions, distant objects did seem to start rezzing.

This test was done with a ground vehicle, and during the extended rubberbanding episodes, the vehicle seemed to stay at about ground level, and terrain became visible. The movement might be attributable to imterpolation by the Viewer, but I don't see how the Viewer knows the local terrain height deep within the next sim. I find myself wondering if a part of the general problem is associated with delivery of Navmesh data.

 

If this behavious were happening on an RC channel, I would consider it reckless to promote the code to the Main Channel

[Ayesha Askham]

Further to this issue, reported by Wolf and others.

This UK afternoon (Sunday March 10th), about 8am PST, I was sailing on Blake Sea and the Southern Channel along the Nautilus coast in a Mesh boat ( a Loonetta).  Sim crossings appeared to be perfectly OK (well apart from a slight hesitation and an audible "thump") at about 15kph.

However, as we approached sim boundaries it became apparent that and land or prims on the next sim were not visible until we had crossed into that sim.  At 15kph that is not a major issue, but it most certainly is NOT expected behaviour!

In some cases reflections of land or prims were visible but the land or prims of which they were reflections were not.  Now in my experience you do not get mirages in SL!

Coupled with the utterly unacceptable crossing problems at higher speeds and the vehicle control issue at higher speeds within sims both already reported on this thread, there is clearly an issue and this needs some explanation and correction as soon as possible.

[Qie Niangao]

Just adding support to observations that the current sim crossing experience is much degraded. Sim crossings always have been a problem, but I've never seen rubber-banding this bad... and I'm not talking about fast vehicles, I mean just slowly walking across sim borders for the first time and waiting tens of seconds for the handoff to take effect.

I have noticed that after crossing back and forth between the same sim pair a time or two, further crossings seem to be (fairly reliably) back to normal. (I don't know whether crossings by one avatar will "pave the way" for others, too.)

I have not noticed a corresponding change in the likelihood of crashing on sim crossings, but I haven't been using vehicles. Also, my simple scripted objects have not had crossing problems (as rarely and temporarily arose with some past updates).

It's not clear how to provide more constructive, actionable feedback about this issue. Because sim crossings are such a chronic problem, maybe we need to devise an exhaustive, objective, repeatable benchmark to run every week, so there are real numbers that indicate the effect of changes, good or bad.