Feeble and unstable

[rasterscan]

Second Life has become feeble and unstable. People are giving up in droves. I dont blame them.

[Solar Legion]

Seriously? A thread?

Boy would you have pitched a fit in the earlier years ....

[Selene Gregoire]

1 hour ago, rasterscan said:

Second Life has become feeble and unstable. People are giving up in droves. I dont blame them.

Not true. SL is actually more stable now that it was in 2004. A lot more.

Don't be such a pessimist. I like you better when you're more optimistic.

[animats]

23 minutes ago, Selene Gregoire said:

Not true. SL is actually more stable now that it was in 2004. A lot more.

Everything in computing has become more stable than in 2004. If anything, LL has not kept up with rising user expectations.

SL needs to break no more often than GTA V or Fortnite. That's basic. "Break" means any failure in immersion, from a forced logout to a failed region crossing to loss of voice connectivity to objects not getting drawn in a reasonable length of time. It's just not acceptable any more. Consumer computing is past that.

[Bree Giffen]

I haven't been in world except for just short periods sitting in just one place. Is there something happening?

[Selene Gregoire]

7 minutes ago, animats said:

Everything in computing has become more stable than in 2004. If anything, LL has not kept up with rising user expectations.

SL needs to break no more often than GTA V or Fortnite. That's basic. "Break" means any failure in immersion, from a forced logout to a failed region crossing to loss of voice connectivity to objects not getting drawn in a reasonable length of time. It's just not acceptable any more. Consumer computing is past that.

Thank you for stating the obvious.

[Whirly Fizzle]

Has anyone laid claim to his stuff yet?

[Cindy Evanier]

1 minute ago, Whirly Fizzle said:

Has anyone laid claim to his stuff yet?

Damn, can @LittleMe Jewell @Ethan Paslong and I have your stuff... left overs for Whirly

[LittleMe Jewell]

35 minutes ago, Cindy Evanier said:

Damn, can @LittleMe Jewell @Ethan Paslong and I have your stuff... left overs for Whirly

I like you more and more every day.  

 

 

Edited April 14, 2019 by LittleMe Jewell

[Lindal Kidd]

In rasterscan's defense, there HAVE been some troublesome issues lately.  One that is ongoing, and acknowledged by LL, is the disconnect-on-teleport bug.  It's hit me a couple of times.

However, I think we are a long way from saying that SL is, overall, "feeble and unstable".

[Jules Catlyn]

If i look at the stats i don't see the online user numbers drop massively. So it seems the ones leaving were never online much anyway (source: an online stats site with a bad word in the name i didn't realize was there)

Edited April 14, 2019 by Jules Catlyn
Source name had a banned word in it

[Jules Catlyn]

1 hour ago, animats said:

Everything in computing has become more stable than in 2004. If anything, LL has not kept up with rising user expectations.

SL needs to break no more often than GTA V or Fortnite. That's basic. "Break" means any failure in immersion, from a forced logout to a failed region crossing to loss of voice connectivity to objects not getting drawn in a reasonable length of time. It's just not acceptable any more. Consumer computing is past that.

I am by no means a scripter or as tech savvy as you but it seems to me that in order to achieve the stability and features you compare it to, Linden Lab would have to start from scratch instead of trying to work with the current format. I don't think you can compare the infrastructure Second Life has to much newer games since it is much older. Those new games also don't offer the variety SL has to offer. So in my humble opinion all those comparisons go rather limp. I commend Linden Lab for what they have achieved with the tools available and hope to be here for many years to come.

[Qie Niangao]

Yet somehow the grid keeps growing in fits and starts.

(Granted, that's week-old data about to be updated at any moment, so I may end up eating my words this week. But still: it's a nice, if nascent turn-around from the past. Here's hoping the teleport-crashing madness is cured before it reverses.)

[animats]

15 minutes ago, Jules Catlyn said:

I am by no means a scripter or as tech savvy as you but it seems to me that in order to achieve the stability and features you compare it to, Linden Lab would have to start from scratch instead of trying to work with the current format. I don't think you can compare the infrastructure Second Life has to much newer games since it is much older. Those new games also don't offer the variety SL has to offer. So in my humble opinion all those comparisons go rather limp. I commend Linden Lab for what they have achieved with the tools available and hope to be here for many years to come.

Most of the stability problems come from accumulated technical debt. LL needs to pay some of that down. The overall design isn't all that bad. All the original designers are gone, and, judging from the viewer code, they didn't document their work very well. So the people maintaining it today are floundering.

This becomes very clear when looking at the region crossing / teleport mess. Fixing that requires things like:

• a clear, documented model of how it's supposed to work
• traps to notice when it goes wrong (some of this has been added lately)
• logs of all network traffic around the time of the problem, both sim to sim and sim to/from viewer.
• very good tools to analyze the logs, to the level of a special purpose log viewer with a limited 3D viewer showing collision volumes only, no textures.  Good job to give a new hire with a game / WebGL background. Then developers could watch a sim crossing or teleport that went bad from the perspectives of all the parties.

Not having that is technical debt. Needing it badly, as now, is being foreclosed for nonpayment.

[Love Zhaoying]

I thought “feeble and unstable” referred to some users..

[Theresa Tennyson]

19 minutes ago, animats said:

Most of the stability problems come from accumulated technical debt. LL needs to pay some of that down. The overall design isn't all that bad. All the original designers are gone, and, judging from the viewer code, they didn't document their work very well. So the people maintaining it today are floundering.

That's debatable. A design that depends on a constant, time critical stream of events that are subject to a high degree of variability and are largely out of the designer's control is flat out bad if there's an alternative, and that's how Second Life works. I can't say if there's an alternative or not. However, I read somewhere that Second Life started based on Philip Rosedale's "vision of a world made from a group of interconnected servers."

I don't know how much work he and his team did to see if this was the best approach, but I also remember him giving a talk where he described when he was a teenager he wanted the door to his bedroom to "open by sliding up like on Star Trek" so he went and dove in with a plan that involved a garage door opener and cutting through the ceiling joists above his bedroom in his parents' house. Doesn't sound like there was a lot of cost/benefit analysis there either.

[Selene Gregoire]

Philip's idea that turned out to be SL, was for a 3D operating system.

[animats]

3 hours ago, Theresa Tennyson said:

That's debatable. A design that depends on a constant, time critical stream of events that are subject to a high degree of variability and are largely out of the designer's control is flat out bad if there's an alternative, and that's how Second Life works. I can't say if there's an alternative or not.

OK, if you're really into this...

Here's a good tutorial on how standard multiplayer games work between client and server. There's a constant time critical stream of events that are subject to a high degree of variability. There are some specific tricks that make first-person shooters work even when lagging. See "Lag compensation" in that tutorial. SL doesn't do that, because shooting at things accurately is not a core feature of SL. SL doesn't even know what a weapon is.

Scaling up to a big world is a big problem. The classic solution is "portals", which do what SL teleport portals do. Big seamless game or virtual worlds are very rare. Sansar, Sinespace, and High Fidelity are not big-world systems; they switch areas with what's essentially the load of a new game level.

SL's approach to a big world is inherently going to have some delay and some artifacts at the seams. If you're willing to tolerate a delay at each crossing, this isn't all that hard. Speeding up existing region crossings is probably possible, and the move to AWS might help. AWS has 100Gbps networking within their data centers.

True seamless region crossings would require a new architecture, one of a kind never before built and run at scale. Others are building such things. There's been a surge of interest, accompanied by heavy funding, in the last two years. Niantic is trying to do world-scale augmented reality. Improbable is trying to do infrastructure for games that can have 10,000 users in one battle. There are some low-budget indie games available for Improbable, but nothing with any traction.The game industry is mostly waiting for this to get beyond the demo level. Nostos is the first heavily funded title to appear on Improbable's platform, and it's supposed to launch as an alpha test on Steam this month. Turns out that themed MMOs are big in China, and Nostos is a big-world themed MMO from a big Internet company in China. Very nice artwork; by the way.

The fragility of region crossings seems to come partly from viewer involvement in them. An architectural problem of SL is that, in the beginning, the sim servers did everything. They even served the asset files. Asset serving for textures and geometry has been moved out to AWS and Akamai's CDN. The asset servers are just web servers. The sim tells the viewer what URL to fetch and is then out of the picture. That got a huge I/O load off the sim servers and made mesh possible.

There's an explicit handoff of viewer control as an avatar moves from one sim to another. Much of the trouble around region crossings comes from this. The server is waiting for the viewer, which means that delay or network error can mess up the handoff. Even when it works, it takes at least one round trip time to the viewer, during which some things sim-side are waiting. And some sim-side things aren't waiting, which leads to various out-of-sequence problems. It all mostly works. Mostly. There are timing and order dependencies that don't seem to be fully understood or documented. SL's internal protocols are documented, but not in much detail.

(I used to work on protocol design. It's hard, but not impossible. It takes a huge effort to nail down all the details, which have to be documented carefully and the error cases worked through in advance.)

The argument for fixing all this is that it's much cheaper to fix the machinery of SL than acquire an SL-sized user base. See Sansar, still at under 100 concurrent users.

Edited April 15, 2019 by animats

[Zero Starchild]

Obviously many people commenting here do not log on SL regularly or for long periods of time but people are crashing left and right sending you home and some log in to find there huds destroyed, AO's wiped out and their avatars messed up permanently and need to redo all their catwa heads and mesh bodies. Not few people but alot. Any travelling by foot or vehicle past a sim crossing and your frozen for long periods of time then crash. This WILL drive people away since it's been going on for a few weeks now.

Lindens know about this and attempting to fix but they are obviously stumped. Do not adjust your computers etc, it is not you it is SL.

Edited April 15, 2019 by Ziggy Starsmith

[Selene Gregoire]

1 hour ago, Ziggy Starsmith said:

Obviously many people commenting here do not log on SL regularly or for long periods of time but people are crashing left and right sending you home and some log in to find there huds destroyed, AO's wiped out and their avatars messed up permanently and need to redo all their catwa heads and mesh bodies. Not few people but alot. Any travelling by foot or vehicle past a sim crossing and your frozen for long periods of time then crash. This WILL drive people away since it's been going on for a few weeks now.

Lindens know about this and attempting to fix but they are obviously stumped. Do not adjust your computers etc, it is not you it is SL.

Odd, I just spent about 12 hours in SL just today. I'm sorry I don't have nearly the issues that others do. I never have.

Sim/region crossings have always been troublesome. I'm more concerned with the being logged out on teleport issues that is affecting so many people, including myself (just doesn't happen nearly as frequently for me than it does for many). That will drive people away if LL can't get a handle on it soon. Not me though. I was used to this kind of thing happening frequently 14 years ago. 

[Cindy Evanier]

1 hour ago, Selene Gregoire said:

Not me though. I was used to this kind of thing happening frequently 14 years ago. 

Not quite 14 but over 10 for me.  I do wonder how people these days would cope with those days of Log ins disabled for a day or more frequently.  TP crashes.  Logging in as ruth, shoes up your bum etc etc

we just got on with it, laughed about it and carried on

[Ethan Paslong]

3 hours ago, Ziggy Starsmith said:

Obviously many people commenting here do not log on SL regularly or for long periods of time

/me knocks on wood ...
 
except for the tp crashes i rarely ever encountered many problems during the years, minor things.. yes, but at most a bit annoying, never enough to prevent me to come back or retry.
I spend many, (too many), hours inworld, using a few alt accounts often, but really serious... rarely find the same experiences as some seem to get on their plate all the time.
When something happens, it's often better to make a small step away and go for a little walk or coffee... don't keep hammering on that keyboard   it won't fix your machine nor SL.

[Raevyn Addams]

Coming from a remote town in Australia, my ping times are pretty pathetic in general. But I've managed to load SL semi-consistently for the last 7/8 years. I've even upgraded my computer twice to keep up with the specs. I'm no stranger to regular crashes, but lately it has been noticeably worse. Instead of crashing maybe twice a night, it's now almost every time I teleport. Before the recent update I even seemed to crash further still just by standing idle or going away/afk and would come back to the 'Darn, looks like you've been logged out of SL' message or something to that effect. But again, recently SL has become almost unusable. 

In Ebbe's recent video posted elsewhere in the forums regarding the future of SL, he did mention a shift of servers not just closer to their base of operations but also internationally, which might (hopefully, possibly) help those like me struggling. I'm not sure if that will drastically since my internet speed isn't a SL issue. But if they are in the gradual process of shifting servers then it stands to reason why some things aren't stable, or are likely to get worse until the move is done. Or maybe that will bring about its own set of headaches. Hopefully there's some contingency for that. Not sure what, I'm not tech-savvy at all. Just hopeful and a little frustrated, but I also understand the frustration on LL's end with conflicting issues that aren't across the board or affecting all accounts at once. The constant crashing is doing my head in, but all I can do is wait and hope things are repaired fast. Or I take an extended break and find another less-than-productive use of my online time

As for the feeble and unstable part relating to the player base... that must be up there amongst topics we can't discuss along with politics and religion, surely! 😛. Regardless, it's all open to personal interpretation. I personally feel a lot of people have issues with interpersonal skills these days more than ever before, especially in this day and age of connectivity where we're all plugged into electronic devices and happy to talk to screens rather than flesh-and-blood people seated beside us (and yes, I get the hypocrisy in such a statement being made via computer on an online forum). I also think anonymity makes a safe mask for people to hide behind online, but that's just my opinion. Feeble and unstable in the real world translates to some form of it here too. That's unavoidable. And now I'm getting down off my soap box because this lofty height is giving me a nose bleed *lol*

[BelindaN]

I do wonder if the fragility of Marketplace is somehow connected to the tech issues with tp.

I still don't buy gifts on MP after it stopped working recently. I still get things dropping from my basket when trying to pay, and sometimes I get page not available, which then clears after going back one page.

It's manageable but has been like this for several weeks now.

[Selene Gregoire]

2 hours ago, BelindaN said:

I do wonder if the fragility of Marketplace is somehow connected to the tech issues with tp.

I still don't buy gifts on MP after it stopped working recently. I still get things dropping from my basket when trying to pay, and sometimes I get page not available, which then clears after going back one page.

It's manageable but has been like this for several weeks now.

That's part of what I have said about not having nearly the issues that seem to plague everyone else. I've recently been using the MP to make some looooooong awaited purchases and haven't had any issues doing so. Have you thought about clearing browser cookies? They can become corrupt.

I know people don't like having to run cleanup and defrag once a week (many believe it not necessary or will mess up a SSD) but doing so is far better for your computer and your programs.