What's up with the Asset Server this week?

[Imagin Illyar]

I haven't seen so many Asset Server errors in a very long time.  Makes it really hard to get any work done.

[Ayesha Askham]

Imagin

Ah the "The Asset Server has failed to respond in a timely manner, object returned to sim" error!  Yes I suspect the Asset Server is missing the ministrations of its Linden Lab techs.  Seen a lot of that this last few days, and several others.

Coupled with the fact that I no longer get avatar or object IMs to email if offline (despite inventory offers and group notices coming through as normal), it is clear that the backbone of SL wobbles badly if the LL techs aren't there to hold its virtual hand.

I guess we will have to wait until the New Year holidays are done and what passes for normality at Linden Lab resumes.

I really do think that LL supposes that no-one actually does anything at this time - presuming that we are all family-bound or in a Winter torpor, I suppose - another example of how badly they mis-understand their userbase.

[Imagin Illyar]

I've also had the problem of IMs not going to email.  Also issues with saving outfits.  I hope they get back to work soon!

[Cincia Singh]

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Ayesha Askham wrote:

... presuming that we are all family-bound or in a Winter torpor, I suppose - another example of how badly they mis-understand their userbase.

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On the other hand it could be that the people who work at LL have families to attend to at this time of year. Or, an example of how badly the user base misunderstands LL.

[Aeromia]

Wouldn't it be great if everyone could take the entire holiday off? Sorry, can't cash your paycheck today, banks closed. Sorry, can't buy groceries today, store's closed. Thousands of real dollars is handled every day through their servers in the form of micro transactions and some people actually subscribe to them for years and years. Skeleten crews should at least be on hand to make things stable, and inventory that is bought with real money should be retrievable. Not with an 'oopsie, buh 'bye'. 

 

I haven't had this happen to me yet. Though I have had the asset server ... 'returning item to sim' thing happen to me several times happen to me in the past week happen while I've been building. I know a couple of people who've had entire inventories disappear with this thing, and they're creators, it's not pretty. What's going to happen when some of a persons favorite items textures suddenly dissapears? They're going to blame the creator, meanwhile that creator is panicking because half their inventory has been gobbled up by LL's asset server shake and told 'ther'es nothing we can do'? 

 

This is why I don't subscribe. I'd like to, but not until LL takes better care of its customers. I love my SL, but LL should take more responsibility for its creation, more pride in it.

[Ayesha Askham]

Cincia

I did not say that Linden employees did not need this break to be with their families.  How foolish of you to believe I would think that!  The next post did point out that most 24/7 services manage to maintain a skeleton staff with operational abilities through the holidays.  I see no reason for Linden Lab to do otherwise.  I do, I suppose tend to forget that the USA is a large country and travelling 500 miles is nothing unusual to meet up with family and distance equals time.  In my view that simply makes contingency planning all the more important.

The issue Imagin, I and many others have been seeing is not related to a simple failure on the principal holiday, it has been happening since the restarts were suspended and will most likely continue until they are begun again.

As to the userbase not understanding LL, you are quite possibly correct, they don't.  However when Philip Rosedale commenced SL and developed Linden Lab's function, he ought to have had a better understanding of his userbase even then.  Matters have not improved in that regard since; though some of the Linden staff do clearly understand the userbase, it is a small minority.

[Imagin Illyar]

Normally Asset Server issues are minor, however, this time I can't even clear lots.  I run an estate that specializes in landscaping.  When people leave I use the About Land tool to return all objects so I can start fresh with the landscaping.  Now I'm getting errors from the Asset Server when trying to clear a lot.  The About Land window says there are no objects but there clearly are plenty.  Sometimes restarting the sim resets this and sometimes it doesn't.  Deleting objects manually isn't always accurate as sometimes tenants bury things underground or zip them up into the sky.  

It's a serious problem and I really hope we don't have to wait until January 7th for it to be fixed.

[Perrie Juran]

First off, regarding E Mails, it may be you don't browse through the Forums but this week there have been several threads and or comments about them.  One is Merchants reporting suddenly not recieving sales E Mails.  There have been reports of problems with G Mail & Yahoo marking SL E Mails as spam.  There's been at least one mention by someone who uses Outlook and someone who uses Comcast.  The Comcast user wasn't even seeing them in their Spam Folder.  All these providers subscribe to Services that provide Spam Tables.  It kind of sucks but the problem may not exclusively be on Linden Labs end and what they can do about it is beyond me.

But what bugs me is this.

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Ayesha Askham wrote:

The issue.....I and many others have been seeing is not related to a simple failure on the principal holiday, it has been happening since the restarts were suspended and will most likely continue until they are begun again.

 

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Why is it always that when some have a problem that they always know "many others" while those of us who are not having troubles tend to know no one else having the problem(s)?

Mind you I am not saying that YOU are not having a problem.  But the above puzzles the heck out of me.  And I say that as someone who is in the camp that  thinks LL could do a heck of a better job on support.

Have you all filed a bug report?  If the problem is on a specific SIM or SIMs have you requested the SIM be restarted?  When I was just a Basic Member I have filed Tickets for Mainland SIMs that I did not own or rent on and have gotten them restarted.

Linden Lab may not catch a problem as early as we might think they should unless the people experiencing the problem file a report.

[Imagin Illyar]

I'm so glad you mentioned the emails going to spam.  I just checked and found over a hundred SL emails dating back to December 11th.  I sure wish that I knew about it earlier, some of them were important.  

[Perrie Juran]

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Imagin Illyar wrote:

I'm so glad you mentioned the emails going to spam.  I just checked and found over a hundred SL emails dating back to December 11th.  I sure wish that I knew about it earlier, some of them were important.  

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It's not the first time it has happened.

While it is a bit of a pain I make it a point to do a brief browse through my Spam folder once a week or so.

I've found things that you'd think shouldn't go there in it.

I was having a dialogue with one of my state legislators once and suddenly found his E Mails in it.  He would also send out bulk E Mails to his constituents and because of that got listed as a Spammer!

[Ayesha Askham]

OK Perrie

Firstly I know of at least 2 others in my friends list who are seeing this issue with IMs, so with Imagin, I suppose that is only 3, so you might well argue that is not many but it is significant, given the sample size.

Secondly, as I pointed out in my first post, it is only object and avatar IMs that are not received offline, inventory offers and group notices are fine.

Thirdly I have checked spam and junk mail folders and the missing emails are not there.  (I use MS Outlook).

Finally, and this rankles, I am not in the habit of mythering on about SL failures.  I only mention them when I have checked most if not all possible pratfalls beforehand.  No, I have not filed a JIRA about this though I have raised a support ticket.  Perhaps I should raise a JIRA...I'll consider that if all does not return to what  passes for normal in SL in the next week.

[Perrie Juran]

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Ayesha Askham wrote:

OK Perrie

Firstly I know of at least 2 others in my friends list who are seeing this issue with IMs, so with Imagin, I suppose that is only 3, so you might well argue that is not many but it is significant, given the sample size.

Secondly, as I pointed out in my first post, it is only object and avatar IMs that are not received offline, inventory offers and group notices are fine.

Thirdly I have checked spam and junk mail folders and the missing emails are not there.  (I use MS Outlook).

Finally, and this rankles, I am not in the habit of mythering on about SL failures.  I only mention them when I have checked most if not all possible pratfalls beforehand.  No, I have not filed a JIRA about this though I have raised a support ticket.  Perhaps I should raise a JIRA...I'll consider that if all does not return to what  passes for normal in SL in the next week.

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I do hope that I did not come across as 'picking' on you.  It really was more of a general observation that puzzles not only me but others at times.  I've experienced asset server errors also.  I'd never say that they don't happen.  I've never however had it as a persistant problem.  Which is something that would lead me to ask if there was a common denominator you share with your friends.  That is why the bug reports are important in this circumstance.  LL may be more likely to see the common denominator. Unlike others, I really do believe that most of the Devs at LL really do want to help us.  

Yes, it is a pain for us.  Time we'd rather be spending doing other things.  I am of the firm opinion that ALL the Devs should be required to spend time In World, an "Eat What You Cook" approach.  I think we'd see fixes and important issues fixed faster this way.  But I don't run the Lab.  So I am in the same boat you are.

Most importantly, I do hope it gets fixed for you.

[Ayesha Askham]

Hi Perrie

Your point about the Linden Devs spending time inworld is a telling one, and led to an interesting convo I had with a Linden employee who I cannot name.

That individual pointed out that a good number of devs DO indeed come inworld, though the number that actually venture onto the Main Grid is quite small.

The old saw that "If devs spent their time inworld nothing would get done" is utterly bankrupt...those Lindens that HAVE spent time inworld on Agni have more often than not gained a valuable insight into how their changes sometimes do not produce the results they confidently expect from their sojourns on Aditi.

Such individuals are unfortunately rare.  There are good folk at LL, I never doubted that.  It is a shame that more do not have better insight.

Edit to Add at 13:42 hr PST:

D'Oh!  I found all the missing messages (and several more) in the spam folder at  my email supplier virgin media!  Now all I need to do is find out WHY this has occurred and stop it happening again.

Needless to say this totally exonerates Linden Lab.  :smileyembarrassed:

[Rhys Goode]

It is *far* from obvious that SL assest severes have anything to do with what google flags as spam.  

I regurlarly have to rescue forwarded SL emails.  Along with newsletters from various other places completely unconnected with SL.  Seems like just about anyone I regularly do business with ends up in the spam file sooner or later.  

For instance, I get a daily newsletter from AAAS, of which I am a member.  Sometimes it ends up in spam.  Now I admit, I do not read it every day, and often delete it without opening.  So eventually, Googles algorithm might well conclude "spam!".  The only odd thing is that it will only do one or two issues.   Hmmm.   Never thought of it before, maybe that is the algorithm checking to see if it really *is* spam.

Anyhow, far from obvious that pushing IM's to spam has anything to do with asset servers.

[Perrie Juran]

I'm not sure if you were replying specificaly to me.

We were (are) discussing two seperate issues in the thread.

I don't think anyone was saying there was a relationship between the asset server problem and the E Mail problem.

[Imagin Illyar]

Wouldn't the email issue be the problem of Gmail and Yahoo?  It's SL's job to send the email, I don't think it can have any effect on whether it goes to the inbox or spam.  Since I discovered this problem yesterday (thanks again Rhys!) I've started marking all the SL email in my spam box as Not Spam.  I get a LOT of email from SL and less of it seems to be going to spam already.  I guess we have to train our emails' algorithyms to get this fixed.

[Perrie Juran]

Whne you consider that messages from InWorld contain info like "duho3udg6f6wzayelqv53zzlbfctqqxub" in the from header I don't consider it far fetched that their spam filters go a bit wonky.

Innula post the instructions in this thread for removing SL Mail from the spam filters.

 

• In Gmail, do a search for lindenlab.com   This should find all communications from SL (including offline IMs).  When you're satisfied it's found the type of email you want to keep,
• Click More>Create Filter
• Check "Never send it to spam" and any other actions you want Gmail to perform.   You may want to check "Also apply filter to matching conversations" if you're telling to send them to a special folder.
• Click "Create Filter" and you should be OK.

See https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6579?hl=en-GB&ctx=mail for further information.   Also, doing a Google search for "create google filters" brings up lots of articles and walkthroughs.

[WolfBaginski Bearsfoot]

It's being reported that Gmail is misidentifying email from Linden Labs as spam. It works OK if you have a filter set up to handle such mail.

[Imagin Illyar]

Yup, just set up my filter.  Seems to be working so far.  Odd thing is this just started happening December 11th.  

[WolfBaginski Bearsfoot]

I am seeing a pattern of slow texture delivery which is consitent with a problem affecting the SSA-system. Yes, sometimes my connection is slow, but after excluding cached textures, textures from the SSA servers are consistently slow to be delivered. Even the textures beiung used by my AV when I logged off not five minutes ago. I see that pattern with both Firestorm and Cool VL Viewer.

Textures applied to new-to-me objects are always the first non-cached textures to arrive, even when textures are sluggish. The sequence is consistent. I've had baked textures take over ten minutes to arrive, sometimes one texture from the AVs full set.

[Linda Haber]

To bring this back on topic: There seems to be a major issue with the asset servers which has been going on for a number of weeks. It seems to affect breedables mainly. For example it is possible to pick them up but when you need to drop them - the drop is greyed out using detach results in the loss of the item. As the items are no copy this is a real issue. 

[Linda Haber]

I have raised a bug report bug-4807 on this issue.

[Imagin Illyar]

According to the Grid Status Report page unscheduled maintenance was performed today.  If it was because of your bug report - THANK YOU!  Let's hope they fixed the problems.

Next time something like this happens I'm going to file a report instead of just complaining in the forums.

[Shamu077]

"To bring this back on topic: There seems to be a major issue with the asset servers which has been going on for a number of weeks. It seems to affect breedables mainly. For example it is possible to pick them up but when you need to drop them - the drop is greyed out using detach results in the loss of the item. As the items are no copy this is a real issue."

As a breeder and seller of breedables, that is what worries me.  It has been going on for over a month, which means it is not just a case of the LL employees on a holiday vacation.  The asset servers seem to be slow, not responding before the time-out - so what has changed?  Many so-called new features - which dont seem to be reducing the load on the servers as was advertised.  LL says they hope to fix the asset problem after New Years - I hope their bean counters realize the top revenue producing sims on the grid belong to a few breedable companies.

 

 

[Perrie Juran]

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Shamu077 wrote:

I hope their bean counters realize the top revenue producing sims on the grid belong to a few breedable companies.

 

 

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Oh really now?

And you know this how?