20 years, still full crash on teleport

[Paul Hexem]

How come after 20 years, the viewers still so often totally soft crash on teleports- the primary way of getting around the grid?

Not only is it a high failure rate, but it's a failure that doesn't just throw up an error, but closes the entire client, effectively telling people to go do something else.

It's really no surprise SL's retention rate is as bad as it is.

[Nalates Urriah]

Most users don't experience that problem. Which means this is a problem specific to you.

If this were a common problem lots of people would be complaining.

On a weekend I often go club hopping in SL. I'll go through my folders of LMs and often visit a dozen or more places. Often in quick succession. Other times I am exploring and may TP from links in the Destination Guide as well as LMs visiting a half-dozen places.

I use Firestorm 6.6.8, the Linden Release Candidates, and Black Dragon in Windows 10-22H2. None of them gives me a problem. I've forgotten when I had my last viewer crash in any of the three.

If I were crashing I would be reading the viewer and Windows event logs to see what was going wrong. I would also consider switching to Henri's Cool VL Viewer.

 

[Ardy Lay]

Only one disconnect on teleport in recent memory...  I was teleporting to meet a friend.  They sent me a teleport offer while I was in transit.  KERBLEWY.  Viewer stuck on the requesting teleport from destination screen.  My friend said via Discord that I had arrived.  I could do nothing.  I had to wait for the viewer to give up, which was a long wait.  The viewer displayed an error I do not recall and made me close it, launch and login again.

Edited April 18, 2023 by Ardy Lay

[Aishagain]

@Paul Hexem  are you really talking about a viewer crash or do you mean the disconnect that occurs when the destination region of a teleport fails to accept the data sent by the source region?  That issue has persisted in varying degrees for the lifetime of SL, and the appearance of the greyscale screen with its options to "read IM or quit" is just as familiar to users now as it was 15 years ago.  That phenomenon is seemingly beyond the wit of Linden Lab to reliably fix, though the frequency of disconnects has noticeably increased again recently.

If your viewer actually crashes to desktop, as Nal suggests, you have a local issue.  I experience occasional viewer crashes and very occasionally ones that do not trigger the bugsplat error report, but not at a frequency that I find alarming.

Edited April 18, 2023 by Aishagain
punctuation and spelling

[Qie Niangao]

On 4/16/2023 at 6:05 PM, Paul Hexem said:

Not only is it a high failure rate, but it's a failure that doesn't just throw up an error, but closes the entire client

It doesn't happen to me often, but it is a bit weird that when it does it's a crash with no attempt at error recovery.

Presumably a crashed teleport results from a seg fault or other OS level process termination. Those events probably generate core dumps, so one would think viewer developers (Linden and third party) could have a handle on why a mere teleport failure sometimes crashes the client.

Tangentially related: I don't really understand why the client can't just stay loaded in background when I logout, until my next login. If there were still significant memory leaks then it would make sense to always exit and reload from scratch, I guess, but otherwise shouldn't a login initialization be able to restore everything a restart does, without needing to reload the program and its resources from scratch? So, it sure seems as if such a login initialization simply was never implemented, presumably due to inertia from when there used to be memory leaks.

[Love Zhaoying]

3 hours ago, Qie Niangao said:

I don't really understand why the client can't just stay loaded in background when I logout, until my next login.

Spaghetti code prevents certainty that everything will "re-load" ok if an error occurred? Just an honest supposition.

Edited April 18, 2023 by Love Zhaoying
Certainty not certainly

[Paul Hexem]

4 hours ago, Nalates Urriah said:

If this were a common problem lots of people would be complaining.

People that leave don't complain. The fact that they have a whole error message for it means it's a viewer issue that they know about and can't or won't fix.

 

3 hours ago, Aishagain said:

@Paul Hexem  are you really talking about a viewer crash or do you mean the disconnect that occurs when the destination region of a teleport fails to accept the data sent by the source region?  That issue has persisted in varying degrees for the lifetime of SL, and the appearance of the greyscale screen with its options to "read IM or quit" is just as familiar to users now as it was 15 years ago.

20 years, not 15.

 

3 hours ago, Qie Niangao said:

Tangentially related: I don't really understand why the client can't just stay loaded in background when I logout, until my next login.

Exactly. There's no reason to force shut down the entire client because of crappy servers.

[Aishagain]

@Paul Hexem you might've been here 20 years ago.  I wasn't.  I said it was familiar to me as a user 15 years ago.  It was.

[MarissaOrloff]

I can't remember the last time I had an actual disconnect on teleport. Ive had a couple of failed teleports where I am forced to relog but those are far and few between. 

[Paul Hexem]

4 hours ago, MarissaOrloff said:

I can't remember the last time I had an actual disconnect on teleport. Ive had a couple of failed teleports where I am forced to relog but those are far and few between. 

Isn't that just a different flavor of the same problem?

[MarissaOrloff]

On 4/18/2023 at 10:54 PM, Paul Hexem said:

Isn't that just a different flavor of the same problem?

They are completely different types of errors. 

[Paul Hexem]

2 minutes ago, MarissaOrloff said:

They are completely different types of errors. 

I haven't spent enough time in the logs to be able to comment on the technical details- only the error message presented to the user, which is identical for both and is a de facto "quit moment" for new players of an online game.

It's effectively a message telling people to go do something else and hasn't been addressed in 20 years.

[Love Zhaoying]

I don't have these issues. Of course, I don't go anywhere and mostly stand still on my own land..

[Aishagain]

4 hours ago, Paul Hexem said:

go do something else

I wish you would

[Paul Hexem]

4 hours ago, Aishagain said:

I wish you would

But then I'd lose the joy of upsetting people like you.

[Aishagain]

@Paul Hexem You don't annoy me, Paul, I am simply at a loss to understand why:

1)  You never actually characterised the nature  of your "crashes" preferring, it would seem, to raise further red herrings.

2) You discount or ignore several others' clearly different interpretations of your experience.

3) You appear to discount the assertions of others that your experience is neither widespread nor considered critical, except perhaps to yourself.

Your experience is valid as it stands for you personally, but apparently no reasonable explanation is acceptable to you.

Edited April 21, 2023 by Aishagain
spelling

[Ardy Lay]

When my little brain sees Paul's forum icon it identifies them as Dick Van *****, so I can't take Paul Hexem seriously, ever, no matter what they post.

Edited April 21, 2023 by Ardy Lay
typo

[Ardy Lay]

Oh wow.  That's not the part of the man's name that I expected to get censored!  I wonder if I spelled it wrong. 

[yanai Auroline]

Never had a teleport crash issues but this week it started and nothing helped every single time i teleport anywhere it loads forever and then say logged out lol its pointless to try and fix it by clearing inventory caches and whatever its all bs tried it all even tried on other pc on other viewers, Only cure in SL is time it will pass on its own had it some years back and it fixed itself sometimes teleports does work right after i login before it goes on the loop again

[Jackson Redstar]

....And you're still the same, I caught up with you yesterday
(Still the same, still the same)
Moving game to game, no one standing in your way
Turning on the charm long enough to get you by
(Still the same, still the same)
You're still the same.......

Seriously though, 15 years ago crashes were part of daily life in SL whether it was sim crashes or tp crashes, I do find now and then a tp will get 'hung up' then crashes the viewer, but not often anymore

[Love Zhaoying]

On 4/16/2023 at 6:05 PM, Paul Hexem said:

How come after 20 years, the viewers still so often totally soft crash on teleports- the primary way of getting around the grid?

Not only is it a high failure rate, but it's a failure that doesn't just throw up an error, but closes the entire client, effectively telling people to go do something else.

It's really no surprise SL's retention rate is as bad as it is.

It's definitely you.

[AmeliaJ08]

I don't think I've ever seen a teleport crash but do occasionally get the teleport 'blocked' bug that forces a relog (or usually results in a random disconnection shortly after). Happens maybe once a week.

 

It is annoying I agree, shouldn't happen.

 

 

Edited August 8, 2023 by AmeliaJ08

[Zalificent Corvinus]

The INFAMOUS SL message we mostly all know and hate is still an all too common thing.

 

"Darn it all to heck, our server setup sucks skunk

butt but we wont admit it's our fault so we're going

to blame it on your PC and internet instead

 

View chat/IM's                              Quit"

 

But actual "crash to desktop" teleport fails are a thing too.

 

Just after the Project Downlift move to Cloudcrap, the Great Oz of the bad sculpty beard, casually dismissed complaints about TP-Disconnects by stating that

"only 2% of teleports result in a crash (to desktop)"

, in a post on the forums here. He apparently thought that was perfectly acceptable. He didn't even mention the number of TP-Disconnects with the snotty "blame your pc/internet" message.

[Sid Nagy]

See it as  adventures features. Social gambling. Will I arrive or is it time to log off?

But more seriously: The last years SL has mainly been solid as a rock for me, aside from entering very heavy crowded sims like during SL20B's opening ceremony.
Even sim crossings are 99+ % without crashing. We are getting there.
Just wait until SL comes out of beta.   😆

Edited August 8, 2023 by Sid Nagy
90% of the writing process involves editing.

[JeromFranzic]

45 minutes ago, Sid Nagy said:

See it as  adventures features. Social gambling. Will I arrive or is it time to log off?

But more seriously: The last years SL has mainly been solid as a rock for me, aside from entering very heavy crowded sims like during SL30B's opening ceremony.
Even sim crossings are 99+ % without crashing. We are getting there.
Just wait until SL comes out of beta.   😆

I didn't attend the opening ceremony, but I was in several crowded sims during that period. Not once did I crash, and in all cases, was able to maintain 25-30 fps overall. (Of course I had to turn off shadows and limit draw distance to 96m with the crowds, and no jelly dolls... not bad for a PC from 2018. )