Rolling Restarts: 2021-12-21

[arabellajones]

These restarts were first announced on Status three minutes before they started, and I have found nothing else.

[Aishagain]

"They're back!"  So...these tricksie announcements have returned... so why did they vanish?  This is so annoying and frankly ridiculous.  It seems once again that the left and right hands of Linden Lab are not well acquainted.

And still there is no information as to just WHAT sort of restarts these are.  Is it a roll to the code introduced on the RC channels last Wednesday, or a simple restart?

Place your bets, ladies and gentlemen.

@arabellajones, the restarts were announced on the GSP at the weekend, but they were pulled yesterday.  They were gone when I checked the GSP at 3pm PDT last UK evening. Why, is a mystery.

Edited December 21, 2021 by Aishagain

[Sayrah Parx]

After the restarts, main channel regions are still on Second Life Server 2021-12-01.566406 that they got last week.

[arabellajones]

It looks as though they are simple rolling restarts, as little as 7 minutes for the restart cycle and no change to the server version, which fits with other info such as Inara Pey's report on last week's SUG meeting. The in-viewer map data looks unreliable: the up/down indicator doesn't update so rapidly. A region could go through the cycle, though it's hard to tell.

 

[AlettaMondragon]

I appreciate the regular restarts even if there's no simulator version update, because restarts are necessary BUT it is extremely annoying that I checked the GSP to see if I can leave my avi logged in while I go away from home (to catch important group chat, mostly), and as there was absolutely no mention of restarts on the GSP and here on the forums, of course I did. Now as I got logged out, as usual for at least a year now, the usual annoying issues are here, group chats not working, and other glitches and malfunctions. The service is unreliable at best lately, just look at all the restarts since the end of November, except today's (yet) ended with minor grid crashes and other issues, so it's hard enough to log in to SL and actually be able to use functions properly, if we get logged out because you do restarts without prior notice, that just makes everything even worse. It would be nice to post that notice a few days in advance on the GSP and keep it there until it's done, as you normally do. Then we know what to expect.

@Maestro Linden @Grumpity Linden @Mazidox Linden Can you give us any explanation for this and this recent bunch of failures during and after rolling restarts? We know you are working on things and some got fixed, new functions were added, etc, that's indeed nice (when we of course notice it because it's hidden in the simulator release notes, but at least featured). It is weird, though, that some of the recent restarts caused issues like the restarting regions didn't come back online for about 3 hours, or remained inaccessible until a manual restart, and other unexpected problems quite all the time (but especially when more than 50 thousand people are online), like teleport failures, group chats not working or being absolutely unreliable (such as dropping messages), even personal and object IMs not getting delivered, even while we're online, and other annoyances. There are a lot of these lately, about the last three months. Do you know what is behind these issues, and why they are more frequent now than, let's say, in August?

Edited December 21, 2021 by AlettaMondragon
Kept the rant but added something constructive too.

[Aishagain]

I simply fail to understand the underlying plan behind this restart schedule.

My home, Woods of Heaven, was restarted today just seven days after being rolled to the present server software version.  It is not long since we were being told (well post-uplift) that regions would only be restarted after 10 or more days, since more frequent restarts were unnecessary.  So has something changed?

Configuration changes may underpin some of  these restarts, though I still see no performance on my region, and by no means all of them.

This all makes no sense and I am left wondering just how much control of Second Life Lindn Lab actually still have.

 

I know that to many all this is pretty trivial and irrelevant and so long as the thing keeps on working, why worry?

That's just it...it isn't!(working, I mean).  We have teleport disconnects that have nothing to do with poor client connectivity and vanishing animesh on top of more traditional maladies.

There is a term used occasionally... SNAFU.

Edited December 22, 2021 by Aishagain

[Sayrah Parx]

The RC regions that I know of are still on Second Life Server 2021-12-10.566713 after the restarts today.  I think around this time of the year they always wait until the first week of the new year to roll anything new, so there are no unexpected issues during the holidays when people may not be around to deal with them.