When are you going to stop this

[Kelley Foxclaw]

Server rolls and updates

Can we have some peace in here and settle with some tested server software?  These updates are getting old.

q

[Marigold Devin]

I wish Microsoft would stop adding those annoying updates to my Windows also.

Unfortunately, technology evolves all the time, as do things in real life. Shop fronts change, fashions and trends too. It's the same with Second Life. 

It's frustrating for sure, but the rolls and updates are essential.

[Imnotgoing Sideways]

Updates are on a weekly schedule.  They won't stop until the grid is perfect and bug free.  Honestly, I'm glad they're doing it this way. ()y

 

 

[anna Acanthus]

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Imnotgoing Sideways wrote:

.... They won't stop until the grid is perfect and bug free. ......... 

 

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I still believe in father Xmas, unicorns, and the tooth fairy

[WolfBaginski Bearsfoot]

All true, but not even Microsoft does a weekly bugfix release.

Besides, as Oskar has reported, the Main Channel rollout takes around 7 hours. That's enough to make Tuesdays difficult for a lot of people. Can you risk planning an event in that 7 hour block?

I do wonder if the drive for Mesh has biased the whole business. Lets stop having new features for a while, and try to get some of those ancient bugs fixed. And maybe a shift to a fortnightly release cycle would help: less disruption for customers, and more time to react to problems with the RC server channels.

When you have something such as VWR-25426  still unresolved, and apparently at such a fundamental level affecting so much of what happens, you have to wonder whether these regular rollouts are really doing anything significant. They are more than just camouflage. Aren't they? 

[Marigold Devin]

I'm on Windows Vista, and so my experience of Microsoft's updates might be vastly different to yours (and actually might be what colours my opinion and tolerance level of LL's number of updates).

They do seem to have brought out a lot of new features, and on a personal level I could have lived without V2, but that is only a personal preference thing. And I'm not keen on this feeling I'm being pushed into using a mesh viewer. Again, though, this is only because of my own personal preferences, and lack of use for mesh (although, of course, I will wish to view what other people create, so excluding myself from a mesh viewer is my own problem, at least for now).

Regarding old bug fixes, they are still working on them.  There are teams of unknown backstage people, not even with Linden names, who work alongside the Lindens who seem mostly to be currently promoting all the features that will bring in more revenue to Second Life/Linden Lab.

The problem with a lot of the bugs, specifically the one you quote VWR-25426, it affects a section of the community, not the majority, and please don't misunderstand me when I say that, because I acknowledge that it is a massive issue to those it does affect. 

I see it like a recipe; Second Life, different viewers that we can use, different operating systems, different graphics cards, not all of us are going to taste the chocolate chips, and if LL haven't got machines set up with exactly the same specifications as a bunch of residents, how are they going to be able to reproduce the problem so that they can fix it?  Just like it can take a whole team of chefs, cooking the same recipe over and over again, testing, tasting, tweaking, until they get that exact taste and texture they need. 

And as residents, we can't all be expected to buy exactly the same model of computer as, say, Oskar Linden, uses, just so we get the nearest to perfect satisfaction from our Second Life (although I'm sure it would make LL's lives much easier).

[Ayesha Askham]

@Wolf and Marigold

You are looking at the same issue from different sides.  There are unresolved bugs affecting the whole of SL that are taking uncountable ages to fix, and there are some sectional ones that seem to be resolved quickly.  Not all are difficult to reproduce.

The recently increasingly serious issue of slow texture-rezzing, via http get, is one that is pretty universal, yet it has been effectively ignored for months, because it will involve, most likely, expenditure on new and more powerful central severs.  The main gripe most folk have is the dearth of information released by Lindens.

The latter is improving, thanks in no small part to Rod Humble, who at last has convinced the board of Linden Lab that they actually do have to pay some attention to their customers.

What we also must remember is that SL was conceived as a technogical tour-de-force, a "Geek-driven-thing", so it truly is a matter of "aww, that broke...never mind, look at this new 'Shiny'".

There are many in SL and a large number at LL who are far more interested in innovation than in fixing broken things.

Now that don't impress me much, but I am increasingly of the belief that what I want or need is simply irrelevant to a substantial portion of the LL personnel.

Those of us that use SL for essentially social purposes, with a smattering of building activity are not the folk that interest much of Linden Lab, so our concerns go largely unaddressed.  We simply don't register with them, our complaints are seen as trivial or fatuous.

However, and this is one definite matter, nothing would ever be fixed at all if we didn't have these irritating weekly rolls.  LL have ably demonstrated that even these small iterations can have catastrophic effects on the SL hardware if not painstakingly checked, and sometimes still do after the best checking they can do.

I, for one, do not wish to return to the debacles of last summer, much less the hopeless mess that SL sometimes was a couple of years ago.

 

[Marigold Devin]

But are we agreed that the weekly rolls are necessary. I certainly prefer them to those afternoons of downtime we used to have in days of yore.

[Void Singer]

My hope is that they NEVER stop.

8hour block, that's more like 15mins or less for any particular region, once a week?

as opposed to 12+ hours hours down for the whole grid at once, once a week, or worse, the frozen in fright never update never fix anything period we went through for a while...

It's simple, don't schedule on tuesdays.

[Peewee Musytari]

I agree, rolling restarts are way better than the old  "Wednesday maintaince" system when the whole grid was closed & no one could get anything done. You can even TP out of the way of the roll & stay connected to the grid now, BIG improvement.

[Nalates Urriah]

Mesh is not the problem. Changes to implement mesh have certainly added problems. But, SL has had problems listed in the backlog of things to fix that have been there for years, well before the mesh project started. Notice the viewer problem you referred to 25,426... that is a lot of viewer problems. The VWR category is just one of several categories.

Some problems, like TimeWarp, take months of analysis to figure out. Interactions between the LL inner network, asset servers, utility servers (like chat), simulators, the concierge service (restarts frozen or crashed regions in new servers), logon servers, and all the other components may not work as expected when stressed. Figuring out how to make such a large system work when it is not obvious what's wrong or even where the problem is takes time.

Some fixes require foundational changes in how the Lab does things and significant portions of the system's software must be rewritten. Such things are planned and scheduled and the fix may extend over months are years. It took about 3 years to change the system to handle mesh. One can't stop everything to deal with just one issue. So, work is proceeding on multiple issue simultaneously.

Since the Lab has limited resources the choice is to prioritize what get fixed or live in chaos. They decide on a balance of adding features and fixing problems. Some features eliminate old problems, some add new problems. 

Each roll out has more fixes and often new features. For someone that has not run into a problem and wants to keep SL as it is, shows a bit of a self centered thinking. Others of have submitted problems we deal with every day and want fixed.

There was a time when new software roll outs were infrequent. Everyone cried about the lab never fixing things. That changed after SLCC 2010 when Phillip stepped up the pace of SL fixes, which I think is a good thing. Now people cry about the restarts. The Lab can't make everyone happy. So, they do what they think best with the information they have.

That's life in the software world, deal with it.

[Ayesha Askham]

@Nalates

Your response, while being accurate up to a point begs the question of bias in the same way that Linden Lab does.

There is a degree of smugness in your response that I find irritating in one so deeply involved in helping other residents of Second Life.

You pretty much make my point for me regarding the balance between fixing broken elements and introducing new features, leading me to level a charge of Geekery at you.

The statement "That's life in the software world, deal with it." really sums up your attitude to SL.  As a Brit I simply don't accept that premise.

I DO deal with it...every day, but I DON'T have to be silent about it.

Oh, and while Mesh may not be the only problem, it surely IS the main one.

[Marigold Devin]

oooo no smiley face added to your personal attack on Nalates! Bad bad gameplay Ayesha :matte-motes-crying:

What is "Geekery"? Why does it need a capital "G"

Still, while you're attacking us here, you're leaving Oskar alone. Poor bloke does his best.

[Void Singer]

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Ayesha Askham wrote:

[...] while Mesh may not be the only problem, it surely IS the main one.

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I might have agreed if you said it was the most visible trouble source... but there are other bigger fish to fry that are more serious and more longstanding

[Ayesha Askham]

@Marigold

No smiley face?  No...I don't "game".  I doubt that Nalates will lose sleep over my irritation. 

As for attacking Oskar, I have never done that, I know that he and his team do their best, they're at the customer interface and they get plenty of flak from others besides me.

As to the Capital Letter...I seem to spray those liberally around my typing - I must be part German!

To explain, by "Geekery" I mean an attitude that finds the medium more important than the message.

Just as an aside I now see that simply getting into SL can be a bit of a palaver (and no, it isn't my router or ISP).

Inventory server maintenance?  Yeah, of course it was....:smileywink:

 

@Void....geesh sorry I used the wrong word...Bite me.

[Void Singer]

right, because your combative attitude, insulting demeanor, and misbelief in your own infallibility have nothing to do with why others react the way they do to you.

You didn't just use the wrong word, you inferred because because mesh has some problems of it's own (mostly social and NOT technical) and other problems are happening around the same time , that it must be because of mesh... well, NO. mesh issues don't even make the top five list... they may get into the top ten, but only because of newness and everyone talking about it. that's it.

[Cincia Singh]

A. Weekly rolling restarts on Tuesdays for the main grid while the residents are allowed to be inworld are WAY better than the Wednesday roll with everyone "locked out" of SL for at least 6-8 hours that we used to have to tolerate. Sometimes it was Thursday before we were allowed back in.

B. Regions get laggy enough with only weekly rolling restarts. Restarting them less often would just make them even more laggy over time.

[Cincia Singh]

There's no problem with Mesh, other than the usual drama and tweaking that takes place every time something new rolls out to the grid. The drama is entertaining and the tweaks exciting. I wear mesh clothes daily, there are more and more mesh items available every day and different creators are using different approaches to mesh quirks. In time mesh will be as common on the grid as sculpties. I eagerly await mesh prefab homes, clubs and other builds.

I expect LL's bias to be their own best interest, from their perspective, regardless what anyone else thinks.

No one has to be or should be silent, but in my experience a more civil tone and approach to criticism gets a person's opinion more respect.