Avatar texture problems from the UK

[Carol Darkthief]

There seem to be a lot of reports of people in the UK having problems loading avatar textures. I has been affecting me.

Nothing seemed to be wrong on the UDP side. Viewer-reported Ping times were normal and there was zero packet loss. Attachments and scenery in general were loading textures without problems, which means the CDN network could have been hiding any intermediate problems. A traceroute to community.secondlife.com confirms a Bay Area location for this server I am typing into, and very different routing.

A traceroute to the sim server shows routing over the Level3 network between my ISP in London and Phoenix

Ping times and a Speedtest to Phoenix give me results in the usual range.

I am not sure how a network fault could be affecting just one sub-class of HTTP traffic between Phoenix and London. Some textures eventually loaded, but a wait of over an hour, with no changes from trying to force a texture rebake or from relogging, leaves me thinking that the problem is in the Linden Lab servers. But why does it seem to be only affecting one part of the world?

I am badly out of date on this networking stuff, but I would urge you to check the SSA Servers. If it's a network problem I can't see how it would be blocking one particular texture every time, but with only four "baked" textures that still could be chance. If it is a network problem I would expect it to be affecting other traffic to the Phoenix area, but how can I check that? Ah, Flying Buffalo Games! Their website loads OK, but I am not sure if their server location is anywhere near their postal address.

 

Can folk, if they have similar problems, do a traceroute to check which provider is carrying their data to Phoenix? It can take a little Googling to pin down the name, but there will be at least a clue in the server names involved.

I'm not sure, I only read English, if anyone elsewhere in Europe is being affected. Likewise, if the problem is between Linden Lab and the transatlantic cable, it might be affecting some people in the USA. Also, from past experience, I know that ywo supposedly independent network providers can end up running their data along one small cable duct. There was one time when a flood took out a bridge, and two completely seperate connections to the USA went down.

 

[Tavey Moonites]

It's not just you! I am in BC, Canada, and have given up being inworld today. My avatar won't load past a sort of blob... *sigh*

[Sarion Koba]

problems as well from Australia, ongoing for over a week.

[Tiffany5309]

Add Southern US to the list. Would be nice if they at least acknowledged and posted a server issue.

[dd Temin]

Yes same  issues when i tried to log in tonite at 9 pm SL time  all gray avatar body and worn clothes.

loging in from USA....South Florida.

dd

[Tenly]

USA too. I have several avatars and can only get the one I use most often to load. the others which I have not used since before the last two viewer updates do not load bodies, clothes or land. so its not my network. if it was my network none of them would load. the one that is loading also has the most inventory. so its not inventory. Ive tried ALL of the old tricks anyway and now have put a support ticket into the lindens. the game is just purely unplayable right now except for the one avi. well who wants just one!

[RiverSong12]

This is happening all over the grid, slow to rez, dropped textures and log outs on teleports.

This started Friday and has gotten worse and no admin is weighing in on the issue.

 

[Vampyrus Blackheart]

It might be something with the latest update to the viewer. I just tried with a third party viewer (Firestorm), and it seems to be working just fine, while nothing seems to load with the official viewer.

[DashaMarshenko]

It's all over the SL grid world wide. Much as I love art... A Study in grey and missing textures isn't. And it's brutally painful for some things to even finally rez.

[Reuben Blakewell]

I can confirm this is still happening and has been for sometime. I created a support ticket with LL.

This is not only just affecting their viewer but thrid-party viewers, I can also confirm it's not only avatar textures but world textures and loading also (http://prntscr.com/52jexy).

I have been through various troublshooting steps on my part and it's very clear and fair to say this is down to LL. When clearing cache, uninstalling, multiple viewers, restarts and graphics driver updates does nothing to the issue present and other things are working fine from the HDD and network connection you're using there is only one reason and it will be down to an error somewhere pointing from LL, if that be their servers or networking.

Hopefully, LL will see this issue and address it fairly promply as well, what the point of a virtual world that's not really that virtual anymore... haha.

 

 

[DashaMarshenko]

I'm in world a cute kajira with a head, hair and feet... nothing else. Crashing into objects that aren't there, but now they're not. LOL it's fun!

[Aethelwine]

For the last 8 hours the best I can manage is a half grey Ruth in a half rezzed skybox. Each time I restart a different part of me is grey.

Kind of glad it is not just me. I hope they fix this soon.

[Janet Patton]

Also in California. Everything is grey, nothing rezzes. Teleports and chat work fine though.

[Dagger Faulkwing]

It is possible that this is something similar to the problems I've posted about (http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Second-Life-Server/bd-p/SecondLifeServer). While I'm not having the really bad problems reported in this thread I have seen one thing that seems to show things are getting worse. Since the last Grid Roll to the Main Server, the one that enabled CDN Grid wide, the small mesh house that I call home has rezzed instantaneously every time I log in and every time I tp home. Before the Grid Roll I would have to wait and click around to fill in lots of emplty spaces in order to make the house fully visible EVERY time I logged in or tp'd home. Yesterday evening and agin this morning I'm back to the old problem when I log in and tp home. Large bits of the mesh house are missing and there's no floor. I haven't clicked anything this morning just left myself standing still while checking the forum and typing this, and nothing is changing, nothing is rezzing. Been over 10 minutes now with no change. This is very depressing. I, too, am from the UK, wired connection, no wi-fi, and line speeds in excess of 60mbps. Ping sim is around 150 which is normal for me and 0 packet loss. I've got bandwidth set to 1500 on all viewers now, which is apparently the recommended Firestorm setting.

[SaraCarena]

Big "grey out" Sunday evening, still happening Monday morning. Latest sl viewer and firestorm.

Statistics bar bandwidth meter shows udp to be fine. Texture console bandwidth meter barely gets into double figures.

Stalled texture/mesh fetches.

 

Catznip viewer seems to work pretty well though.

[Ayesha Askham]

This is not good.

I tried a "Live chat" support last UK night and I got a very dusty response suggesting that there was "No Problem" and that I should only access Secondlife with the "Official" viewer.  I think this support operator was reading from an old script, but to me it was clear that LL simply did NOT want to admit to there being a problem. 

That has not been their recent approach so I think someone was being very defensive. :smileyfrustrated:

PS none of my viewer's inworld metrics were showing any problem but no avatar textures were rezzing and all day I had been encountering invisible objects...mostly prim.

[MBeatrix]

[...] I got a very dusty response suggesting that there was "No Problem" and that I should only access Secondlife with the "Official" viewer.

That is not good at all, but somehow I got used to it over the time I've been in SL. The last one was some ignorant operator insisting it was a problem with my ISP when in fact it was BUG-6735.

Yes, I've seen a lot of grey people around since Saturday morning (GMT) although my only issues have been teleports taking a long time and ending up logging me off, many sim crossings and slow server response while running scripts.

[Perrie Juran]

I don't know what was going on last night.  I'm in the U.S. and it was severe for me and lasted several hours.  And the reports were widespread including other friends in the U.S.  Avatars refused to rez, remaining grey and attachments never rendering correctly.  Other textures refused to load.

I kept expecting an 'unscheduled maintenance' to pop up in Grid Status but it never did.

It went on for several hours and then went away as suddenly as it started.

I did log in for a few minutes this morning and everything looked to be back to its usual (ab)normal state.

I'd certainly hate to go through a repeat of last night.

[Carol Darkthief]

That sounds a little bit different from my experience; it seemed to be the SSA that was the chief problem, mesh attachments next, I didn't see any problems with prim attachments. I shall give things a try in a little while, I have one or two RL things to do first.

I do recognise a couple of names here from the chat logs I have from Sunday.

It's a long time since anyone threatened to pay me for my internet knowledge, but I have been known to get down and dirty with the internet protocols, especially DNS. This situation is easiest to explain through problems with the SSA servers or the Linden Lab network, rather than a wider ranging problem that was likely to be affecting other services sourced from the Phoenix area. But it isn't always easy to see the difference.

 

[Perrie Juran]

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Carol Darkthief wrote:

That sounds a little bit different from my experience; it seemed to be the SSA that was the chief problem, mesh attachments next, I didn't see any problems with prim attachments. I shall give things a try in a little while, I have one or two RL things to do first.

I do recognise a couple of names here from the chat logs I have from Sunday.

It's a long time since anyone threatened to pay me for my internet knowledge, but I have been known to get down and dirty with the internet protocols, especially DNS. This situation is easiest to explain through problems with the SSA servers or the Linden Lab network, rather than a wider ranging problem that was likely to be affecting other services sourced from the Phoenix area. But it isn't always easy to see the difference.

 

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I didn't specify which attachments and I consider mesh clothes an attachment.  Maybe that is not really accurate though.

99% of what never rendered was Avatar related.  It was quite literally the worst I'd ever seen things myself.  And from what I gleaned from local chat as well as from IM's with a few friends how bad it was varied from person to person. 

[SaraCarena]

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Ayesha Askham wrote:

 

PS none of my viewer's inworld metrics were showing any problem but no avatar textures were rezzing and all day I had been encountering invisible objects...mostly prim.

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I looked in the texture console last night (sl pipeline viewer). The bandwidth monitor there barely made it into 10`s and I believe that`s purely http bandwidth unless http textures are disabled. When http is behaving it`s normally can be in the 100`s depending on what you`re doing . The FETCH queue also stalled for long periods with textures stuck in the htp or htw state. World map wouldn`t load (remember Maestro`s reply in last weeks deploy thread?) All points to a CDN tantrum.

A friend in Belgium was having no problems at all.

Logged in with catznip, no problems. Didn`t realise til today that catznip has http textures turned off by default, whereas most viewers have it turned on.

First thing I`ll do next time this happens (fingers crossed won`t be a next time though :smileywink:) is diasble http textures.

[Ohjiro Watanabe]

I'm in the UK and having no problems with either Firestorm or LL viewer.

[Carol Darkthief]

Even in California, it has stopped being Sunday, so I am not astonished that things have improved.

[Waylon Blackthorne]

I'm seeing similar problems with textures remaining grey for extended periods of time or failing to load altogether. This relates to environment and avatar textures mostly but the world map also seems to be affected. It all started to go downhill from Sunday evening and persisted through to this morning.

[Tenly]

mine has resolved as of last night. hope ya are good now too