Groups In SL

[Blush Bravin]

Just now, Ceka Cianci said:

Oh that's ok.it happens..hehehe

There is something else I'm trying to remember and I may be getting it mixed up with something else..But weren't we early on with only 20 groups?

I could be mixing things up with a whole other virtual world also..but for some reason20 is popping into my mind and I'm not sure if it was groups or not..has there only been one increase in group amount or was there two?

My memory totally sucks these days, but I was thinking that we started with 10 groups in the way back.

[Cindy Evanier]

I got 60 groups.  My alt has 40 groups.  Another Alt has 40... and so on...  happy.   Thing is the groups I choose to be in, I turn off chat and notices for anyway because how many times a day do you need to hear someone demanding the notecard for that particular groups weekly sales. THREE DAYS BEFORE THE ACTUAL DAY  🤬

[Ceka Cianci]

5 minutes ago, Blush Bravin said:

My memory totally sucks these days, but I was thinking that we started with 10 groups in the way back.

I just did a look back in the forum archives and it was 25 when I started..you've been here a couple more years than me so it may have been 10 before I got here..

I kind of remember now getting a little excited about premium having the group increase..But remember there was an increase for everyone as well..

Well,I'm glad that song stopped buzzing in my head now..hehehe

[AyelaNewLife]

33 minutes ago, Ceka Cianci said:

I take it you were not around before the increase? Because there was always problems with group chat back then..

People had been asking for years for an increase as well as groups to be fixed..

Chat service issues will not be affected by the number of group slots you have. Neither one will have any impact *at all* on sim lag for others, because simply existing in a group generates no measurable load on any server.

The problem you're recalling is with the chat service itself struggling to cope with the total load. Capping the number of members a single group can have would make more of an impact, the 20-30k member supergroups for some of the biggest creators cause more chat load than a hundred smaller groups for smaller stores or sims with only a thousand members (server load for chat services increases pseudo-exponentially as the population of a single channel increases). Doubling the premium group cap will only cause a massive spike in chat service issues if you assume that people will fill up those slots with Catwa, Maitreya, Blueberry, etc - the reality is that these overbloated groups are already full of the people that would be interested in them.

It's also been 8 years since the group cap was raised, any remotely decent chat service can deal with a hell of a lot more load now than in 2011.

[Ceka Cianci]

3 minutes ago, AyelaNewLife said:

Chat service issues will not be affected by the number of group slots you have. Neither one will have any impact *at all* on sim lag for others, because simply existing in a group generates no measurable load on any server.

The problem you're recalling is with the chat service itself struggling to cope with the total load. Capping the number of members a single group can have would make more of an impact, the 20-30k member supergroups for some of the biggest creators cause more chat load than a hundred smaller groups for smaller stores or sims with only a thousand members (server load for chat services increases pseudo-exponentially as the population of a single channel increases). Doubling the premium group cap will only cause a massive spike in chat service issues if you assume that people will fill up those slots with Catwa, Maitreya, Blueberry, etc - the reality is that these overbloated groups are already full of the people that would be interested in them.

It's also been 8 years since the group cap was raised, any remotely decent chat service can deal with a hell of a lot more load now than in 2011.

Yea,that's probably what I am remembering..I just remember them not wanting to come off them groups too easily hehehehe

Well if they do it and it works,that would be a good thing..

Also I might have been thinking of the increase before the premium one anyways..I forgot there were two increases to the groups..

I can't even remember what changed that they were even able to give us the first increase that I'm aware of hehehe

[Parhelion Palou]

1 hour ago, AyelaNewLife said:

I half agree with the OP, to be honest. I'm totally fine with a group limit of 40 for free accounts, no issue with that. But I can certainly see why the premium limit should be far higher; the number of groups each avatar is in does not come with a measurable cost for LL, giving premiums a limit of 200 would take all of five seconds and would make things easier for everyone. It's like the IM cap; I don't mind the cap for free accounts, but the premium cap is such a small increase that it makes premium seem like an outright scam.

Where are the people who know things? I used to, but I'm forgetful. Here it is as I remember it:

Groups most definitely have a cost to LL because they affect simulator performance. A more accurate term for 'group' is 'land group'. LL created them so that groups of people could administer a parcel/region. They weren't meant for mass communication across the grid. At the time it must have made sense for group chat to go through the simulator. Odds are the people administering a region would be on the region, so the simulator running the region could handle the group chat and all would be good.

When group members are on different regions and use group chat, each message has to go from the simulator the originating avatar was on to all other regions who have group members. It may be a broadcast to all simulators, for all I know. Each simulator that gets the message has to check every avatar on the region to see if they're a member of that group. If so, that avatar is given the message. Increasing the group limit per avatar means the region has a rapidly increasing amount of work to do. More groups to search through for each avatar and more messages in general.

[AyelaNewLife]

6 minutes ago, Cindy Evanier said:

I got 60 groups.  My alt has 40 groups.  Another Alt has 40... and so on...  happy.   Thing is the groups I choose to be in, I turn off chat and notices for anyway because how many times a day do you need to hear someone demanding the notecard for that particular groups weekly sales. THREE DAYS BEFORE THE ACTUAL DAY  🤬

I have 55. 18 of those are sim groups that I've either paid entry for or been manually assigned a photographers tag for rez rights. 22 of those are paid shop groups with a fee, with gifts or a higher rate of credit attached to that fee. All but 2 of those 40 are chat-muted. 3 groups for land management, 7 groups for interests/communities that I actively use (and half have fees or manual invitations anyway). That leaves 5 that I could drop, and just rejoin whenever I need the shop credit or rez rights; and those 5 I keep because I use them fairly regularly. Anything else, I just join-use-drop using my 5 remaining slots. So yeah, I'm not a fan of the "I don't need 40 groups therefore no one needs 40 groups" crowd.

[AyelaNewLife]

4 minutes ago, Parhelion Palou said:

Where are the people who know things? I used to, but I'm forgetful. Here it is as I remember it:

Groups most definitely have a cost to LL because they affect simulator performance. A more accurate term for 'group' is 'land group'. LL created them so that groups of people could administer a parcel/region. They weren't meant for mass communication across the grid. At the time it must have made sense for group chat to go through the simulator. Odds are the people administering a region would be on the region, so the simulator running the region could handle the group chat and all would be good.

When group members are on different regions and use group chat, each message has to go from the simulator the originating avatar was on to all other regions who have group members. It may be a broadcast to all simulators, for all I know. Each simulator that gets the message has to check every avatar on the region to see if they're a member of that group. If so, that avatar is given the message. Increasing the group limit per avatar means the region has a rapidly increasing amount of work to do. More groups to search through for each avatar and more messages in general.

This may have been how it used to work, it's the kind of early-2000s garbage development that everyone was doing back then  I was working on the assumption that the "industry standard" chat system they put in place in 2011 would have undone any nonsense quirks like that, especially given how long it took them to increase the group cap; but I suppose there is a possibility that LL truly are that incompetent. A very slim possibility.

[Parhelion Palou]

Just now, AyelaNewLife said:

This may have been how it used to work, it's the kind of early-2000s garbage development that everyone was doing back then  I was working on the assumption that the "industry standard" chat system they put in place in 2011 would have undone any nonsense quirks like that, especially given how long it took them to increase the group cap; but I suppose there is a possibility that LL truly are that incompetent. A very slim possibility.

The industry standard system didn't work out. The performance was worse than what they already had. I suspect it comes down to how badly do you want to break SL in order to fix groups? I would have created social groups to go with land groups and set it up so that messages could go directly to avatars no matter where they were. That may not be possible in SL's architecture without knocking down the whole house of cards.

[AyelaNewLife]

7 minutes ago, Parhelion Palou said:

The industry standard system didn't work out. The performance was worse than what they already had. I suspect it comes down to how badly do you want to break SL in order to fix groups? I would have created social groups to go with land groups and set it up so that messages could go directly to avatars no matter where they were. That may not be possible in SL's architecture without knocking down the whole house of cards.

It's more that, even in 2011, no "industry standard" external chat service would have been set up to be embedded into individual sims like this. They'd have to write their own in-house service, at least partially.

In any case, the fact that the 20k+ member megagroups contribute more to the problem than a hundred smaller groups is still accurate.

[Parhelion Palou]

3 minutes ago, AyelaNewLife said:

It's more that, even in 2011, no "industry standard" external chat service would have been set up to be embedded into individual sims like this. They'd have to write their own in-house service, at least partially.

In any case, the fact that the 20k+ member megagroups contribute more to the problem than a hundred smaller groups is still accurate.

Yes, they couldn't fit the round peg into the square hole without breaking the peg & making the whole effort pointless.

I agree on a megagroup being a bigger part of the problem than many small groups. Unfortunately, what the OP wants is the ability to join more megagroups (store groups).

[Selene Gregoire]

1 hour ago, Blush Bravin said:

My memory totally sucks these days, but I was thinking that we started with 10 groups in the way back.

I was just now thinking the same thing. It was 10 to start.

[Ceka Cianci]

44 minutes ago, Selene Gregoire said:

I was just now thinking the same thing. It was 10 to start.

That had to be before i got here I think..I think I remember when I started they were at 25..

you guys were like a couple years before me though.I am a 2006 baby..hehehe

[Qie Niangao]

This is not all about group chat, and certainly the simulator performance hit of increased group count has never* had anything to do with chat.

Years ago there were Linden developers already lamenting the decision to pool all "group"-related semantics into the single "group" construct, and the particular problems caused by land permissions being associated with group membership. Can an avatar even enter a parcel? Does it depend on their group membership? Oy, so many groups to check!

It's not only parcel/region access, of course, but that's the one most traffic-sensitive.

_____________
* "never" for as long as group chat hasn't been sim-mediated, which is as long as I can remember anyway.

[Selene Gregoire]

29 minutes ago, Ceka Cianci said:

That had to be before i got here I think..I think I remember when I started they were at 25..

you guys were like a couple years before me though.I am a 2006 baby..hehehe

Yep. It went something like 10, then 15, then 25, then 40 for Basic & Premium. Not sure when they upped Premium to 60.

[Selene Gregoire]

16 minutes ago, Qie Niangao said:

Can an avatar even enter a parcel? Does it depend on their group membership? Oy, so many groups to check!

Why would anyone need to check what groups they are in to see if they are in a group for access? They don't know what groups they have joined? Do people forget such things that easily? 

[Qie Niangao]

Just now, Selene Gregoire said:

Why would anyone need to check 

Not people. The sim.

[ETA: It's true, I anthropomorphize system components. They're variously naughty, sexy, cranky, etc., and apparently some of them speak Yiddish.]

Edited February 18, 2019 by Qie Niangao

[Selene Gregoire]

1 minute ago, Qie Niangao said:

Not people. The sim.

Ah. Gotcha. I was looking at it from a different perspective. 

Yep. Definitely server load, not client side.

[AyelaNewLife]

56 minutes ago, Qie Niangao said:

This is not all about group chat, and certainly the simulator performance hit of increased group count has never* had anything to do with chat.

Years ago there were Linden developers already lamenting the decision to pool all "group"-related semantics into the single "group" construct, and the particular problems caused by land permissions being associated with group membership. Can an avatar even enter a parcel? Does it depend on their group membership? Oy, so many groups to check!

It's not only parcel/region access, of course, but that's the one most traffic-sensitive.

_____________
* "never" for as long as group chat hasn't been sim-mediated, which is as long as I can remember anyway.

Why would it check all of the avatar's groups for this? That sounds like back-to-front thinking. Surely the sim would check to see if the avatar is in the specified group's memberlist (if a check is needed at all; which is a minority of parcels), rather than checking each individual group to see if that group has a "allowed in Parcel A" flag somewhere (because those flags don't exist).

[Love Zhaoying]

1 hour ago, Qie Niangao said:

Not people. The sim.

[ETA: It's true, I anthropomorphize system components. They're variously naughty, sexy, cranky, etc., and apparently some of them speak Yiddish.]

Who’s a saucy syscap? Oh, you know you are!

[Qie Niangao]

1 hour ago, AyelaNewLife said:

Surely the sim would check to see if the avatar is in the specified group's memberlist 

Maybe so. I'm just relating what I remember of office hours from ages ago, so it's possible I've forgotten some details. I do however have a pretty definite recollection that Lindens were worried about increasing the number of groups per avatar because "groups" could be associated with land permissions, as opposed to hypothetical strictly social "groups".

[Love Zhaoying]

Is it possible that there are more groups than avatars?

[Lindal Kidd]

3 hours ago, Selene Gregoire said:

Why would anyone need to check what groups they are in to see if they are in a group for access? They don't know what groups they have joined? Do people forget such things that easily? 

Me!  Me!  I do!

[Selene Gregoire]

31 minutes ago, Lindal Kidd said:

Me!  Me!  I do!

I was actually thinking of land groups specifically. You wouldn't forget what land groups you are in specifically for land access... would you? 

[Lindal Kidd]

2 minutes ago, Selene Gregoire said:

I was actually thinking of land groups specifically. You wouldn't forget what land groups you are in specifically for land access... would you? 

Hey...once I almost left a group because I couldn't place it.  At the last minute, I realized I was in it because they were paying me to rent my spare tier.