Deploy Plans for the week 2019-06-24

[Mazidox Linden]

Second Life Server:

https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Release_Notes/Second_Life_Server/19#19.06.11.528038

Scheduled Tuesday 2019-06-25 03:00-09:00 PDT

Second Life RC BlueSteel (No Roll):

https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Release_Notes/Second_Life_RC_BlueSteel/19#19.06.14.528215

Second Life RC LeTigre:

https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Release_Notes/Second_Life_RC_LeTigre/19#19.06.14.528215

Scheduled Wednesday 2019-06-26 07:00-10:30 PDT

Second Life RC Magnum:

https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Release_Notes/Second_Life_RC_Magnum/19#19.06.14.528215

Scheduled Wednesday 2019-06-26 07:00-10:30 PDT

On Region Restarts:

Regions will be restarted if they have been running for more than 10 days on Tuesday (Main Channel) and Wednesday (RCs) regardless of whether or not new code is being deployed, for the general health and well being of the Simulators.  Nothing beats turning it off and then on again … once in a while.

As always, please plan events around these maintenance windows.  However, if you are hosting an event on Tuesday or Wednesday when we’re not deploying new code, you can restart your region ahead of time to avoid interruption.

[Aishagain]

Firstly, thanks Maddox.

However, the post suggests there is a Main Server roll today yet GSP, he say nuttin!

Wake the oppo on the status page up, please.

Oh, and the dates are STILL wrong there!

Edited June 25, 2019 by Aishagain

[MBeatrix]

11 hours ago, Mazidox Linden said:

Second Life Server:

https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Release_Notes/Second_Life_Server/19#19.06.11.528038

Scheduled Tuesday 2019-06-25 03:00-09:00 PDT

Whatever today's roll did (yes, I read the release notes) Nuggy's performance became ridiculous. It's almost impossible to do anything, as scripts run are around 3% most of the time, when they were around 90% before the rolling restart.

Support ticket filed requesting a new restart to see if that fixes whatever went wrong.

[EDIT] A new restart fixed whatever the problem was. Still not the performance it had before today's rolling restart but much, much better than it was before I filed the ticket.

Edited June 25, 2019 by MBeatrix
adding more info

[Vendahl]

Hello all,

First off I am new to this game however I am a long time gamer...started in the late 90's.  So this means I do have a clue about most things having to do with how games run etc... The lag lately has become so terrible! I've spent quite a few dollars here and dang...will someone fix something already? I am certain it is not on my end, I have high speed I-net and my system is well beyond the required specifications. I would like to spend more as I am having a blast...when the lag doesn't make the game almost unplayable. Please fix this.

Vendahl

[Minuet Voir]

38 minutes ago, Vendahl said:

First off I am new to this game however I am a long time gamer...

Welcome to Second Life, gamer. 

38 minutes ago, Vendahl said:

So this means I do have a clue about most things having to do with how games run etc...

Good to know. 

38 minutes ago, Vendahl said:

The lag lately has become so terrible!

So you'd be looking for things that changed within the past 4 weeks when things weren't terrible. That might help to narrow the focus.

42 minutes ago, Vendahl said:

Please fix this.

Quote

[2018/03/27 12:40:19]  Simon Linden: anyway, once we fix all lag and region crossings, it will be much smoother

On the other hand, you might try the viewer support forum for some troubleshooting suggestions. 🙂 

[Vendahl]

I appreciate your welcome and thoughts. I'm using the latest firestorm viewer that is adjusted for optimal performance and right now I cannot even change my clothes without a 5+ minute delay. I've even tried the second life viewer and now cannot even change outfits at all. Reset my router, checked everything on my end. I'm a retired IT person so I am certain it is not on my end. There is something wrong on SL side.

Edited June 27, 2019 by Vendahl

[bigmoe Whitfield]

1 hour ago, Vendahl said:

I appreciate your welcome and thoughts. I'm using the latest firestorm viewer that is adjusted for optimal performance and right now I cannot even change my clothes without a 5+ minute delay. I've even tried the second life viewer and now cannot even change outfits at all. Reset my router, checked everything on my end. I'm a retired IT person so I am certain it is not on my end. There is something wrong on SL side.

rofl,  SL is unoptimized and there is no way to make it optimized,  "retired" or not.  system bottle necks cause client side lag which is what you are seeing,  server side lag is almost a non existent thing in today's SL.  "well it's not my system"   it is, it always is,    some helpful tips,  turn the draw distance to 128m or lower,  turn off shadows,  make sure your connection rate is 1500,  also if you are visiting areas that have HUGE amounts of people, you will always always have a form of lag, there is no way around that beast.

 

 

Edited June 28, 2019 by bigmoe Whitfield
I did not do the type well.

[Theresa Tennyson]

12 hours ago, Vendahl said:

I appreciate your welcome and thoughts. I'm using the latest firestorm viewer that is adjusted for optimal performance and right now I cannot even change my clothes without a 5+ minute delay. I've even tried the second life viewer and now cannot even change outfits at all. Reset my router, checked everything on my end. I'm a retired IT person so I am certain it is not on my end. There is something wrong on SL side.

Theresa Tennyson mentally pictures how the person who typed this would have reacted when they were working as an IT person and someone came to them with a "trouble report" like this.

[Nalates Urriah]

@Vendahl we get to hear from 'experienced' gamers every so often. All say pretty much the same thing. So, you aren't saying anything we haven't heard before. What you have told us, that is new, is now you are joining the club of "Oh s__t, the game is laggy!" If you ever wondered if TRUTH is Objective or Relative, I point you to lag as an objective truth...

SL is not like any other game when it comes to performance. So, your optimising for game play here has to be radically different.

Consider. Most games require you to download the game prior to playing it. That includes all THE CONTENT. SL has over 200 petabytes of content... at 100mbps you need a bit over three years at 24x7 to download that much data. So, caching and network performance are uncommonly huge effects on performance.

Sharding in multi-player games is common. That is somewhat different in SL. A region might be thought of as a shard. But, you can change the size of an SL shard by adjusting the Draw Distance (DD). Maxing the DD on even the top gaming machines will bring them down to single digit FPS. There is way more going on in SL regions than in most game shards. The data flow affecting viewer render is huge. At 1024m DD your viewer is having to communicate with about 80 region servers plus the backend systems. You see similar communication-render lag in EVE Online battles.

Star Citizen and EVE Online are expensive to play. Last year (2018) SL players cashed out US$64 million. The twist in the economy is because of user created content. Star & EVE have content created by professional modelers and programmers. They are paid some bucks. SL has a massive amount of content created by users, novice and hobby modelers & programmers and most are NOT paid by the Lab. Some of those novice peeps have no clue what the concept of game-optimization is about. So, we will forever have render lag from non-optimized content.

Another new problem... new-ish... is script overload. The viewer has a stats panel (Ctrl-Shift-1). One of the metrics is Scripts Run %. At 100% all the scripts in a region were able to run. This includes scripts on avatars. This means that within a 22ms frame the server did script-wise everything that needed to be done. Time Dilation is a metric that tells us what the server is doing overall. When the server is running out of time and not getting scripts, key strokes, mouse clicks, view updates, avatar movements, and other stuff handled in that 22ms time slice it distorts time in different ways, like reducing the frames per second the server is running. We also see that in the Server FPS. The two metrics are not the same thing... but without getting technical we might as well consider them the same.

The result of any of these metrics degrading is lag. Learning how to read them and optimize for them guides out SL optimizing.

With numerous people complaining about the recent change in Scripts Run % the Lindens have started looking for WHAT HAS HAPPENED? Rider Linden has already made some changes and in week #27 we will server updates with more logging to determine WHY the 15% to 25% numbers for Script Run have swept across the grid. The lastest from the CCUG is here.

In the last month the Disconnect on TP and when Crossing Regions has been mostly resolved. That was a problem that started in December 2018 (IMO) and grew worse into May when the Lindens decided that while they couldn't reproduce the problem or see it in their stats they better start looking deeper. New logging code and they found the problem. They spent 4 plus weeks fixing and even now improving crossing reliability and speed is on their agenda.

My point is SL is NOT static. Almost every week the servers get an update. On average there are always 2 or 3 viewer upgrades in the works and 1 to 4 Project Viewers in testing. I run the Linden made SL Viewer RC for EEP as my second viewer. Their stated goal in making changes is to improve performance. The coming BoM is a step in that direction and will hopefully reduce the number of textures we have to download and render and that should... might... improve performance.

 

[arabellajones]

On 6/28/2019 at 1:57 AM, bigmoe Whitfield said:

make sure your connection rate is 1500

This is one of the tricky settings. What I am seeing my viewer built-in Help telling me is that this only affects UDP traffic, which has been shrinking for years. Stuff such as textures have been shifted to http. Just that is a huge difference. There are recommendations for the setting, based on the type of connection, and they haven't changed since the days when everything was UDP. That does make me wonder if I can trust the advice.

If the UDP traffic has been halved, it wouldn't surprise me if the minimum recommendation hadn't dropped that much, but no change at all just doesn't make sense.

This is one of those things where any definite answer is likely to be wrong for you. All you can do is try. That 1500 setting is the absolute maximum setting recommended, labelled as "cable", and all I know is that I can't get "cable". That tech used to be high-speed co-axial, and my current DSL is faster than some "cable" tech that was being used a decade ago.

And using the Wi-Fi label, the standards for that have changed too, it can be much faster, but the number of wi-fi systems I see as I walk along the street with my smartphone, all from router/modems using the same out-of-the-box default channel, I have a feeling that anyone using wi-fi, for anything, needs to do some serious thinking about how it is set up. I think I would stick with the Wi-Fi label because of the bandwidth sharing with your neighbours, a totally different class of problem, but "DSL" and "cable" are looking antiquated as labels

I would say you have to try different Connection settings. You might even get better results down at 250 or 300, but I would try 1500, 1000, and 500. There's no point in going higher, there just isn't going to be that much UDP traffic now. And Second Life is rather unusual in how it shares UDP and HTTP. Keep an eye on packet-loss rates.

[Vendahl]

Thank you for the explanations and how in depth you went. I appreciate your efforts and will every bit of that information in mind. Funny thing is a few days ago...all the issues I was experiencing stopped. Again I will keep in mind what your shared, makes total sense what you are saying. 

 

Again Thank You!