Group chats

[Paul Hexem]

Why do these STILL fail?

I mean... This isn't some new and experimental technology we're talking about. Chatting on the Internet in groups has been going on since the 80's.

When I was 12 years old, I was sticking chat rooms on web pages for free- it's not expensive or complicated software.

Why is it LL still can't get it right? Retarded monkeys could put together a reliable chat service, it's ridiculous.

I mean, what is it about group chats in SL that's so complex?

[Dilbert Dilweg]

Yea. I have wondered the same thing. Why it still fails, and why it still lags, and why I never get to see the first message sent to group before getting a popup. They boasted that it was being fixed, . Granted it is a little better than before, but not ideally reliable as it should be IMO

 

[Perrie Juran]

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Gadget Portal wrote:

Why do these STILL fail?

I mean... This isn't some new and experimental technology we're talking about. Chatting on the Internet in groups has been going on since the 80's.

When I was 12 years old, I was sticking chat rooms on web pages for free- it's not expensive or complicated software.

Why is it LL still can't get it right? Retarded monkeys could put together a reliable chat service, it's ridiculous.

I mean, what is it about group chats in SL that's so complex?

---

I was thinking about this recently and would make some observations.

I never used IRC very much, really only a few times, so I can't talk experimentally about them much.  Other than the IRC Chat rooms I have been in did have limits on how many people could be in the room at one time. 

Really, my Chat Room experience started with MSN Groups and later with Yahoo Groups.  They both had limits on how many people (50) could be in an individual Chat Room at a time.  I do wonder now why that was?  Was it to just help keep them manageable or were there other technical implications?  Would the chat have started to slow down as the Server kept track of everyone, distributing messages, etc, as they happened?

Many people think it must be easy to fix group chat.   You have to really think through the implications of what is going on with a "group chat."  The Servers need to constantly know who is on or off line in the group.  Add to that 42 groups per User. Where are you on the Grid? Other related factors. Simply put, I think that there is a lot more data processing going on than meets the eyes.

If I recall correctly, Rod did say recently that improving Group Chat was a priority but that it wasn't as simple as many people think.

Me, I know I don't know enough to really talk about it.  But when I start considering the factors involved in making  a "group chat" work, I do see the potential for it to be a lot more involved than meets the eyes.

I'm not saying it hasn't happened, but I've never seen any of the Resident Coding Gurus come forward and say, hey, I've got the App that will streamline the whole thing for you.  If it were that simple I'd think we'd have seen it.

Just my two cents worth.

 

[Paul Hexem]

---

Perrie Juran wrote:

---

Gadget Portal wrote:

Why do these STILL fail?

I mean... This isn't some new and experimental technology we're talking about. Chatting on the Internet in groups has been going on since the 80's.

When I was 12 years old, I was sticking chat rooms on web pages for free- it's not expensive or complicated software.

Why is it LL still can't get it right? Retarded monkeys could put together a reliable chat service, it's ridiculous.

I mean, what is it about group chats in SL that's so complex?

---

I was thinking about this recently and would make some observations.

I never used IRC very much, really only a few times, so I can't talk experimentally about them much.  Other than the IRC Chat rooms I have been in did have limits on how many people could be in the room at one time. 

Really, my Chat Room experience started with MSN Groups and later with Yahoo Groups.  They both had limits on how many people (50) could be in an individual Chat Room at a time.  I do wonder now why that was?  Was it to just help keep them manageable or were there other technical implications?  Would the chat have started to slow down as the Server kept track of everyone, distributing messages, etc, as they happened?

Many people think it must be easy to fix group chat.   You have to really think through the implications of what is going on with a "group chat."  The Servers need to constantly know who is on or off line in the group.  Add to that 42 groups per User. Where are you on the Grid? Other related factors. Simply put, I think that there is a lot more data processing going on than meets the eyes.

If I recall correctly, Rod did say recently that improving Group Chat was a priority but that it wasn't as simple as many people think.

Me, I know I don't know enough to really talk about it.  But when I start considering the factors involved in making  a "group chat" work, I do see the potential for it to be a lot more involved than meets the eyes.

I'm not saying it hasn't happened, but I've never seen any of the Resident Coding Gurus come forward and say, hey, I've got the App that will streamline the whole thing for you.  If it were that simple I'd think we'd have seen it.

Just my two cents worth.

 

---

I'm not going to advertise anyone specifically, but there are plenty of scripted objects designed to replace group chat, using HTTP comms, that work flawlessly.

Not to say you're wrong- there's a lot of factors, like you said. But that's actually part of the problem. LL might have overcomplicated it to be sending too much information back and forth for something that should be much simpler.

[Erik Verity]

Actually it is almost the whole problem. The scripted objects that replace group chat will only work flawlessly if a lot of their functions are separate from the viewer software - and without the same numbers of people to communicate to. If they always have to go through SL servers for each direction of communication and to the same numbers of people, the SL group chats will outperform them easily. When I test my own http objects, the communication is quick - most of the time. Every so often there is a delay and you can't predict it, although I still haven't seen it last longer than 15 or 20 seconds. If the receivers are getting the message through the web, they are bypassing SL servers. Going through the same servers for one person to send while everyone receiving uses their own internet connection is not a fair comparison at all. There is no inworld object replacing a group chat that is servicing anywhere near the same numbers of chatters. If even one group with thousands of members, and possibly hundreds connected at the same time were to use one, it would be very well-known and most large groups would be using them.

The single biggest factor is the shear number of connections - inside the software much less. Group chats with a lot of online members are the slow ones. I can go in small groups and there is no noticeable lag. The very large groups are the ones suffering.

[Paul Hexem]

The "lots of members" excuse is flat out BS. I'm in a group of maybe 10 people, with maybe 3 or 4 online at any given time, and I still see failures.

[Erik Verity]

Then I won't say that's it exclusively, but I have never seen it happen yet in a small group on my end. It still is not total BS - try to create an inworld object any way you want and see if you can get it to send a message to even 100 different avatars with no one seeing a delay. You can't do it.

[Qie Niangao]

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Gadget Portal wrote:

The "lots of members" excuse is flat out BS. I'm in a group of maybe 10 people, with maybe 3 or 4 online at any given time, and I still see failures.

---

Maybe, but I don't think it's BS. You may remember a couple years ago they spent quite a lot of time trying to retrofit the whole group chat backend with XMPP, only to eventually realize it was a fool's errand: although XMPP scales beautifully in number of sessions, it couldn't handle very large sessions.

At least that's how I recall it, not having been involved myself. I don't think I ever followed it closely enough to understand why it's so easy to scale the numbers of sessions, and of connections, but not the number of connections per session.

I'm curious if these flawless scripted solutions are known to handle hundreds or thousands of simultaneous participants per session.

[Paul Hexem]

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Qie Niangao wrote:

---

Gadget Portal wrote:

The "lots of members" excuse is flat out BS. I'm in a group of maybe 10 people, with maybe 3 or 4 online at any given time, and I still see failures.

---

Maybe, but I don't think it's BS. You may remember a couple years ago they spent quite a lot of time trying to retrofit the whole group chat backend with XMPP, only to eventually realize it was a fool's errand: although XMPP scales beautifully in number of sessions, it couldn't handle very large sessions.

At least that's how I recall it, not having been involved myself. I don't think I ever followed it closely enough to understand

why

it's so easy to scale the numbers of sessions, and of connections, but not the number of connections

per

session.

I'm curious if these flawless scripted solutions are known to handle hundreds or thousands of simultaneous participants

per session

.

---

Here's where I'm stuck; if the blame truly were on the amount of users, then small groups would never, or rarely, fail. Except they do. Almost as often as the large groups do. That means there's another problem somewhere in the setup, more than simply "too many users".

That tells me LL is trying to do too much with group chats. It seems like when you try to chat, it's involving simulator data for the sim you're on and/or it's including information like whether you're contributing land to the group, and all kinds of other extra data that's completely irrelevant to the actual chatting.

I think Erik is spot on. The scripted objects work nicely because the only data they carry is the message, and they don't have to rely on SL's already overloaded servers.

[Perrie Juran]

---

Gadget Portal wrote:

---

Qie Niangao wrote:

---

Gadget Portal wrote:

The "lots of members" excuse is flat out BS. I'm in a group of maybe 10 people, with maybe 3 or 4 online at any given time, and I still see failures.

---

Maybe, but I don't think it's BS. You may remember a couple years ago they spent quite a lot of time trying to retrofit the whole group chat backend with XMPP, only to eventually realize it was a fool's errand: although XMPP scales beautifully in number of sessions, it couldn't handle very large sessions.

At least that's how I recall it, not having been involved myself. I don't think I ever followed it closely enough to understand

why

it's so easy to scale the numbers of sessions, and of connections, but not the number of connections

per

session.

I'm curious if these flawless scripted solutions are known to handle hundreds or thousands of simultaneous participants

per session

.

---

Here's where I'm stuck; if the blame truly were on the amount of users, then small groups would never, or rarely, fail. Except they do. Almost as often as the large groups do. That means there's another problem somewhere in the setup, more than simply "too many users".

That tells me LL is trying to do too much with group chats. It seems like when you try to chat, it's involving simulator data for the sim you're on and/or it's including information like whether you're contributing land to the group, and all kinds of other extra data that's completely irrelevant to the actual chatting.

I think Erik is spot on. The scripted objects work nicely because the only data they carry is the message, and they don't have to rely on SL's already overloaded servers.

---

It is very possible the entire system needs retooling from top to bottom. 

Group chat requires too obvious things.  Knowing that you are in the group and knowing that you are on line.  What ever Servers are handing this are obviously bogging down.  Does a group with 10,000 users slow down a group with 100 users by mere fact they are sharing a Server?

[Paul Hexem]

Good question. That's part of what I'm asking with this thread.

[Madeline Blackbart]

to be fair a retarded monkey could not program a chat. Programming is somewhat difficult and while I've never done a chat beforeI can imagine it's not that simple. That said they did hire programmers with knowledge in the field to do the job so it is still qustionable why it is n't working correctly.

[Qie Niangao]

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Gadget Portal wrote:

Here's where I'm stuck; if the blame truly were on the amount of users, then small groups would never, or rarely, fail. Except they do. Almost as often as the large groups do.

---

This is simply not my experience. Yeah, occasionally, all group chat lags, gets out-of-sequence, etc. The same sometimes happens in open chat, too, which uses a totally different mechanism. But large group chat seems to nearly always have such problems. Doesn't it?

[Branux]

Personally I don't care about a little chat lag, that happens. What really upsets me is the groups that NEVER open. They close automatically with an "Unable to start a new session with .....  The session initialization is timed out." And I don't mean now and then, there are some groups I have NEVER EVER been able to get to post in or see post from.

 

I run a couple of groups and one of them has started to become this way. In the beginning it worked about 85% of the time, now it fails about 85% of the time to even open.

 

I constantly get error messages when trying to open groups. I try over and over and over again but some just don't seem to want to open so a post can be made.  Outside of second life I have never had this happen and I have been chatting since the early 90s.  Sure things get lost now and then, but not consistantly like this.

[Perrie Juran]

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Gadget Portal wrote:

Good question. That's part of what I'm asking with this thread.

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And sadly, none of us are going to know the answer.

I really need to start bookmarking more stuff cause my google-fu is failing too much.  I cited Rodvik above on how he said it is a priority but it is more complicated than meets the eyes and I can't find where that was.

Consider the Server Architecture as it relates to any single one person logging in, all the 'switches' that have to be tripped.  Where are you on the Grid. Who else is there.  What were you wearing when you logged out.  What groups are you in.  All your inventory.  Who are all your friends? Are they On Line or Offline or hiding from you?  Stored messages awaiting your log in.  Are you wearing an A/O:  We need to start animating you?  Do we need to connect you to the voice servers?   And then add into it connecting you to a group chat.

I sometimes think that any of this working at all as successfully as it does it pretty impressive.