The Channels

[Prokofy Neva]

So, if I read this post by Grumpity Linden correctly, it sounds like there are now only two channels for the SL software:

o Release Candidates (RC)

o SL Server (SLS)

There used to be three channels, named for the poses in the movie Zoolander, who knows why:

o BlueSteele

o Magnum

o LeTigre

Various "urban legends" grew up around these channels, which you could readily see by looking on the part of the viewer with "About Second Life". You would have a sim that would repeatedly have "issues"; you would discover it was a BlueSteele sim. You would ask the Lindens to change its channel; they would agree and change it. We lived through that era; it was accepted.

At some point, the channel on which a region was on began to be associated with "good real estate" or "bad real estate". That was misleading, to be sure, given that two sims that were similar and next to each other or across from each other on a continent, could be on two different channels and frankly, have different performance, even though the Lindens had "rolled them out" and put them on the old auction at the very same time, so that their server type and date were similar.

We who have to look at these things daily did really see that there were indeed performance levels associated with channels. I personally never made any real estate claim based on these designations because it did not appear to be consistent and was too obscure. But THAT there were indeed performance questions associated with channels was a fact of nature.

At another point, it began to be uncool to ever say this; to ever claim anything was different about any channels, even though we could see this repeatedly every week with our own eyes. And the very designation of these channels then was hidden; you could no longer see it.

That is, supposedly, if release notes or deployment notes in a certain thread were read carefully, you would "be able to tell" which channel it was, and therefore make your own private observations about such matters, never speaking of them publicly so as not to be uncool.

Now, they seem to have been forgotten or jettisoned entirely, although we do note that Release Candidates is in the plural. That means hiding under the RC would be two of the three "poses" or in fact actual "channels". We don't know which ones, unless, of course we reside at Linden office hours.

This is my understanding of this matter and if someone wants to correct it they may but they would need to:

o decode the plurality of Release Candidates, which contains within it the very notion of "beta" or "something uncooked" as it is only a candidate -- it does not yet hold office, so to speak;

o determine which of the three poses was on the now more stable SL Server.

What is the point of all this? With enough observation, over time, a land owner could file a ticket with Support and ask for a particular sim to be taken off a quad it may be sharing with a club. Such things have been known to happen, and in the old days, where this status was visible on a web site maintained by a guy named Max, the Lindens would agree to move, say, your quiet pastoral fairy garden off the same server where it was a secret sharer with, say, a raucous vore club.

Is this a different issue than the "channel"? Possibly. But I note that a Linden would tell you solemnly they were changing the region's channel sometimes to get it to work better. These notions did not spring up in a vacuum or a cloud of unknowing; they emerged from Help. 

 

Edited February 3, 2023 by Prokofy Neva

[Love Zhaoying]

From what I saw in the past, the most likely reason for multiple channels previously was because LL had multiple "feature sets" of the Server Viewer in testing at the same time.

Each "set of features" was probably being managed by a different team, and/or had a different priorities.

By keeping the "channels" separate for each of these, it allowed LL to make changes in one for further testing, without affecting the others.

For example:  BOM vs. AWS vs. Performance, vs. 3D vs. Linkset Data. (Not real "channels", just examples).

If we surf through the previous release notifications / posts, we will probably see that LL used to identify what each "Channel" was being used for testing.

Why not have separate "Channels" right now?  We'd have to ask LL - but my guess is, fewer teams, fewer concurrent development "streams", less need to test them concurrently, etc.

I say some of this from the perspective of a developer (eww, a programmer) with 35 years professional experience.  Anyway, sometimes I saw their announcements about "the Channels" and it made sense to me. 

[Solar Legion]

There were always "two" channels - the RC has three different sub-channels for testing *gasp* Release Candidates!

The RC servers will always get the newer versions of the server code before the main line ones - this is how you "tell" which of the two types you are on (without it being directly disclosed): These servers will also always be fewer in number than the main line. After that, well good luck nowadays because they did indeed stop telling you which sub-channel an RC server is on.