Restarting sims

[Andrea Fawcett]

there are so many myths , old data, and just flat out wrong information that have built up over the years and i was wondering what exactly are the long term effects of restarting a sim/region.. for instance have heard

• it can take as many as 8 hours for the sim to "settle" from all the scripts restarting and so forth after a restart.
• that you should not restart the sim if there's problem before a large event.  
• that sim restarts will move your sim to a different server that can possibly make lag worse.
• sim restarts can sometimes make builds disappear.

[Klytyna]

34 minutes ago, Andrea Fawcett said:

for instance have heard

Ok...

34 minutes ago, Andrea Fawcett said:

it can take as many as 8 hours for the sim to "settle" from all the scripts restarting and so forth after a restart.

Ummm, yeah this is what we technically refer to as "Tech-Illiterate SL-Fossil Permanoob School of Everyone Knows Class of 2006 'I spoke to a Linden once so it must be true" Bollocks"  

38 minutes ago, Andrea Fawcett said:

that you should not restart the sim if there's problem before a large event.

Depends on what exactly the problem IS, and if it's one that can be fixed by a restart...

Poor sim perfomance from "memory leak" due to excessive time between restarts, or lag caused by lots of heavy landscaping and building... Restart it.

Poorsim performance caused by having too many scripts, or physical set linksets, or pathfinding. Resetting wont help worth a damn, don't even waste your time looking at the button.

41 minutes ago, Andrea Fawcett said:

that sim restarts will move your sim to a different server that can possibly make lag worse.

Maybe a restart will relocate your sim to a different server, and maybe it won'tr, maybe relocationg will make things worse, and maybe it won't, you have no way of knowing, and no way of affecting the outcome, so don't waste time worrying about it.

43 minutes ago, Andrea Fawcett said:

sim restarts can sometimes make builds disappear.

Sims update their 'stored state at regular intervals, if you reset very quickly, after throwing down a build, it can SOMETIMES mean that when the sim restarts, it does so from a saved state prior to the new build going in...

You'd have to do a build damn fast, and restart damned fast and be unlucky for it to be a major problem.

45 minutes ago, Andrea Fawcett said:

there are so many myths , old data, and just flat out wrong information that have built up over the years

Yup you're right, a lot of that problem is really old accounts who knew nothing worth while, and just "chinese wispered" some garbage they heard from somebody who heard from somebody, who asked entirely the wrong Linden (what exactly does PayRollClerk Linden know about the sim server hardware?), and which is assumed to be "True" because you heard it from a 12 yr old account, who's SL-IQ is automatically believed to be equal to their SL age measured in weeks, and who *gasp* once spoke to an actual member of the Linden Clan!

 

 

[Callum Meriman]

4 hours ago, Andrea Fawcett said:

• it can take as many as 8 hours for the sim to "settle" from all the scripts restarting and so forth after a restart.

Easily provable and quite false. All script's resume normally under 2 seconds.

4 hours ago, Andrea Fawcett said:

that you should not restart the sim if there's problem before a large event.  

There is a tiny chance, 1 in 1000 or so the region won't come back. But it is still a good idea to restart a region before a big event to make sure it's performant around the physics are, which has some memory leaks to this day.

If it fails you can now avail yourself of the restart options on the owners secondlife.com webpage to get it going. Or do it during business hours if you are still nervous. It doesn't need to be rebooted 1 second before opening, 1 day or 2 days before is fine.

4 hours ago, Andrea Fawcett said:

that sim restarts will move your sim to a different server that can possibly make lag worse.

Half True, but more often then not your move (rare by the way) MIGHT (not will) move your region to a BETTER (not worse) server. There is something in the restart code that seems to look at performance of the server and move you, if the server is overloaded. Hence it's a positive thing.

If it makes it worse, involve the Lab with a support ticket and ask the region is manually moved.

4 hours ago, Andrea Fawcett said:

• sim restarts can sometimes make builds disappear.

Mostly False. Because this was the primary way no-copy items could be duplicated the Lab have worked over the last decade to close off all bugs around this.

The only way it will happen if there is a bug in the simulaor software, that has happened once or twice in the last 5 years (around LI calculations). In those cases the Lab reverted the regions to the last backups.

Andrea.... also, the word you are looking for is region, not sim. Simulator defines the software on the server that runs a region.