Mesh O.K. but Text kills SL ???

[GuruKrishna]

you can see mesh & all kinds of 3-D graphics.

you can see amazing vistas of windlights .

you can manipulate & create physics enabled objects.....

but you try and merely use text to communicate with a

group, and SL hangs like S.O.B. ???

Many people even make their own personal groups,

and STILL they cannot get a message to go thru.

Isn't communication one of the most important things?

 

..... discussions?...comments??

[Syo Emerald]

Those are two totally different pairs of shoes and can't be compared with each other.

[Ren Toxx]

1) Groups, including their chat function, were apparently not designed for the kind of heavy use they've become subjected to nowadays.

2) Though the actual content of each group message may indeed be far lighter than those other contents you mention, their distribution is not quite as easy. When you wear a mesh outfit, its data has to be transmitted only to those very few within the same region (and actually within view of your avatar); group chat messages, on the other hand, have to be continually sent and received between lots of different servers, all over the grid, for the many people -often hundreds- who happen to have the group chat session active (plus, I imagine, further checks for those who may not be active yet, but online and therefore eligible to start receiving them). Open an IM to a single avatar and you'll rarely, if ever, see that kind of lag (though, to be fair, IM conference should also be lag-free for that same reasons, yet it actually works even worse for me, something that has always puzzled me).

Group chat lag has been a constant battle for LL; I seem to remember they did some fairly noticeable optimizations prior to raising the groups limit from 25 to 42... but then of course they did raise the limit, which apparently has ended up counteracting those previous improvements. Now they're working on more optimizations... while many users are somewhat blindly asking for a yet higher groups limit... go figure :smileyindifferent:

[Annie Rubanis]

Yes, they are related.  As it turns out, there are bugs in the system that have surfaced because of the amount of resources each computer needs to use to render mesh, a serious bug is that it causes text input lag.  This isn't an unrelated issue.  And now that LL has decided to build a new toy to play with and are leaving a small team to do tech support for this SL, I'm guessing we won't get any relief from this at all.  This is what happens when you cobble programs together and the right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing.

[Perrie Juran]

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Annie Rubanis wrote:

Yes, they are related.  As it turns out, there are bugs in the system that have surfaced because of the amount of resources each computer needs to use to render mesh, a serious bug is that it causes text input lag.  This isn't an unrelated issue.  And now that LL has decided to build a new toy to play with and are leaving a small team to do tech support for this SL, I'm guessing we won't get any relief from this at all.  This is what happens when you cobble programs together and the right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing.

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That 'cobbling' as you are calling it happened over ten years ago.

 

[Parrish Ashbourne]

groups would be easy to fix if chat groups were not attached to land groups, an other part of the problems is the the servers have to locate even one in the group to send the massages to, and people don't just stand in one place all day in SL in the same sim.  Not every one in the group is all ways chatting, the other may be running around or teleporting, the chat servers probably have a really hard time locating some one mid teleport, or at sim crossing. 

[Amethyst Jetaime]

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Annie Rubanis wrote:

Yes, they are related.  As it turns out, there are bugs in the system that have surfaced because of the amount of resources each computer needs to use to render mesh, a serious bug is that it causes text input lag.  This isn't an unrelated issue.  ....

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What is you source of information for this assertion?  Even if true, this would seem to me more of a problem on the end users side than anything such as older computers, slow connections etc. 

I rarely have a problem with text chat lag and when I do it is only with over sized groups with huge memebership and only on days and times that there are a lot of people logged in.

[Xiija]

?*

(though, to be fair, IM conference should also be lag-free for that same reasons, yet it actually works even worse for me, something that has always puzzled me).

*/

i have had chatlag with conference calls wth 6 or less people...

i wonder how internet chatrooms work, and if this could in amy way

be used in SL ?

i think people would be willing to pay for a lag free "conference" room,

if even for an hour or so....?

we've tried other options like Dolby Axon.. but it takes up alot of scrrenspace

[Sassy Romano]

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Parrish Ashbourne wrote:

groups would be easy to fix if chat groups were not attached to land groups, an other part of the problems is the the servers have to locate even one in the group to send the massages to, and people don't just stand in one place all day in SL in the same sim.  Not every one in the group is all ways chatting, the other may be running around or teleporting, the chat servers probably have a really hard time locating some one mid teleport, or at sim crossing. 

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IF this is indeed the way it works, that the chat server has to relay the message to everyone via the region that they're in then that would be a woefully bad architecture since as you say, the current region would have to be found, this makes no sense as a design.

All the chat server has to know is their IP address which will be static across SL sessions and any group membership such that an incoming message would basically be "get the data set of IP addresses of users in this group and send message <msg>".

I can't think for a moment that what you suggested would be the way that LL implemented it but then... they've done some pretty brain dead stuff in other places so who knows.  I don't know anything about the actual implementation of the group chat protocol but it's possibly more likely a volume issue that is constantly reached, finding a bottleneck.

[Parrish Ashbourne]

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Sassy Romano wrote:

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Parrish Ashbourne wrote:

groups would be easy to fix if chat groups were not attached to land groups, an other part of the problems is the the servers have to locate even one in the group to send the massages to, and people don't just stand in one place all day in SL in the same sim.  Not every one in the group is all ways chatting, the other may be running around or teleporting, the chat servers probably have a really hard time locating some one mid teleport, or at sim crossing. 

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IF this is indeed the way it works, that the chat server has to relay the message to everyone via the region that they're in then that would be a woefully bad architecture since as you say, the current region would have to be found, this makes no sense as a design.

All the chat server has to know is their IP address which will be static across SL sessions and any group membership such that an incoming message would basically be "get the data set of IP addresses of users in this group and send message <msg>".

I can't think for a moment that what you suggested would be the way that LL implemented it but then... they've done some pretty brain dead stuff in other places so who knows.  I don't know anything about the actual implementation of the group chat protocol but it's possibly more likely a volume issue that is constantly reached, finding a bottleneck.

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I'm not smoking crack, start listing at 1:42 into the video, any one interest in group chat should see this.  The teleport theory is how ever mine, but seam reasonable if they have to locat the avatar.

 

 

 

[Sassy Romano]

Thank you!

That's insane, retarded, anyone could have seen that could never scale. Sometimes you do have to bang your head against a wall and just rock bank and forth.

(I should have added earlier, that even better would have been for group chat to subscibe to a multicast address rather than necessarily use each clients IP address).  Whatver, from that video it's clear that SL wasn't designed by infrastructure architects!

[Parrish Ashbourne]

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Sassy Romano wrote:

Thank you!

 

That's insane, retarded, anyone could have seen that could never scale. Sometimes you do have to bang your head against a wall and just rock bank and forth.

(I should have added earlier, that even better would have been for group chat to subscibe to a multicast address rather than necessarily use each clients IP address).  Whatver, from that video it's clear that SL wasn't designed by infrastructure architects!

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Makes you wonder if Philip Rosedale thought it would be easier to start a new company then fix SL

Sassy I think you understand whats going on now, and probably could haveeven prevented it, but for all the people that keep asking why's it's so hard to fix some thing a simple as chat, this isen't a chat issue it's in the core structure of SL, none of the people that caused this problem even work at are at LL any more, I feel bad for the people that inherited this problem.  The simple fix would be  time machine.