arabellajones

The claimed 10 days seems pessimistic. I have seem mixed results on sims reporting 21 days and over. My guess is that heavy use may be an element. So my relatively low-usage Linden Homes region was OK, while Kuula region, heavily used, was showing serious lag and eventutally crashed several hours before the restarts last week. So 10 days might be a safe trigger level. Remember, if the test is done on a 7-day cycle we're going to have some regions up for 16 days.

While I don't see anything more than gossip and rumour, we're at T+7h and even SpaceX can get out news of a scrubbed launch faster than that. Heck, that's enough time to fuel a booster, scrub the launch, change a few settings in the booster's internal code, re-fuel the booster, launch at a new T-0, make a soft landing with the booster, and then have it blow up later. I suppose we're due a Rapid Unplanned Server Deployment.

Rather than shift threads, we got the status announcement of the roll starting, at the expected time. No news for 4 hours. A lot of regions with unchanged version numbers. Maybe just chance, but I checked a big enough sample. Something feels off.

We have the info now, and they have done a bit better job of timing, but after the events of February, I am a little bit nervous. I installed one of those lag detector things on my Linden Home Parcel, because it also detects region restarts, and something last month badly messed up the regular restarts. I know of regions that ran three weeks without a restart, and the effects showed. We shall see how long it takes.

There is a Status entry for this problem, timestamped Mar 5, 07:47 PST (15:47 UTC)

I am carefully backing away from the JIRA before I say something rude. It's a tool designed for management and control of workers. not for dealing with customers. But this is the error message I get in Firestorm. Not every group, but it looks like a server problem. I checked my connection. No apparent problems, ping times from the UK are at usual levels for North America, slightly better than for the old data centre.

Well, I tried the fix. It didn't work. I don't know anything about @Rocko Linden, but I have to wonder if he is the Vice President of Coffee Distribution.

Cue helpless giggling

Nothing in Status about this. Clearing cache (you have to re-log for that to take effect) is unusual advice, and suggests a viewer problem. Something is reported about the SL Viewer, texture corruption, leading to a rollback of the default version. But I suspect I am seeing the same problem, and I run Firestorm under Linux. The last chat I have logged for the Firestorm Support group is timestamoed [2021/03/03 14:42] So how can it be a viewer problem, and how can clearing cache fix it?

This doesn't seem specific to any particular viewer. There are various Preferences which affect the frame rate, One of the most obvious is the Draw Distance. Shadows can knock the frame rate down a lot. Some things depend on the graphics card and drivers used. I can run several different viewers, and with EEP all have been updated in the last year. Some of the options are managed differently. Some viewers have more help popups available than others. If the Help says some option affects frame rate, it's worth trying, but I was trying various things today, and some of the help info seems out of date. Of course it depends on your hardware, but several times I found that the recommendation was wrong. The help says switching off an option increases the frame rate, and the frame rate drops. And I am still trying to figure out what the help on some things actually means. The way that caching can be done in video RAM has changed a lot. I don't feel able to trust the Help built into the viewer. except as a warning that something might have an effect. The whole graphics game has changed a lot, and it's hardly fair to blame any particular developer for not being able to see changes. I know there's some talk of new viewer versions in the works. That could change everything for you. But it looks worth saving a copy of your settings before your next viewer upgrade. And, when you do upgrade, check you have current graphic drivers. That could pay off more than any settings change.

The map behaviour is still not fixed, but last night I saw a few slight changes. Hardly anything useful, but zooming out slightly was different.

It looks like the minimal automatic notices on Status. The usual auto-repeats didn't happen on the social; media I follow, so I don't know if I can trust the timestamp on Status for the maintenance in progress. I know it hadn't appeared at 3:30am PST.

Somebody could have rezzed something nearby with a high rendering load. I would check where the viewer thinks my cache is. I have had, for no obvious reason, my cache location change from the SSD I use, and the does slow thijngs down. Things such as a slow connection usually show as slow rezzing rather than low fps. One other general check, what else is running on your computer? I have some tools monitoring load on my system, and sometimes something gets very different, but you will have problems checking if you don't know what to expect.

Close to midnight, SL time, and nothing. Scripts which detect region restarts may have failed, I am seeing signs of problems with scripts starting, but I know of one Main Channel sim server which hasn't restarted since February 9th 2021. WAKE UP, LINDENS!

So what did they say? The Lindens must have a hell of a hangover from that farewell party...

Thanks. This particular issue really does need clearly documenting in the SL Wiki I was lucky, the item which has started spewing those error messages is one with scripts I can read and modify. Many are not.

Ok, an nVidia 750 is old, and there have been a lot of fakes around from China, but it's not a bad card. But 9xx cards and later do NOT have a VGA connection. I currently run a 960 card. A 1050 is close on benchmarks and uses less power. Looking at a better PSU is still a good idea. There was a long gap before the 10xx series was replaced, and later models are still new and expensive. It's not just about bitcoin. nVidia 750 benchmark = 1055 Power = 55W nVidia 1050 benchmark = 2345 Power = 50W An nVidia 1650 is about twice that again; but that is feeling on the high side for price. There are tradeoffs in the choices. You need to check the power connectors and the video connectors. My machine is old, but it was high-powered when new. Second Life doesn't need a lot of cores. I find 4 cores and 8 threads rarely reaches 50% CPU load.

It looks like nobody at Linden Lab has a checklist. I was following the reporting of the 50th anniversary of Apollo 14 on Twitter, and they could keep track of plans and bugfixes, using voice radio, over a quarter million miles. Yes, they had checklists, and they changed procedures to work around problems. They didn't use JIRA...

One thing on draw distances: the standard SL viewer has a minimum draw distance of 64m, while Firestorm has a minimum of 32m. The LOD setting can be useful, but I reckon that if a creator says it needs increasing to see a product properly, they didn't know how LOD worked when they made it. But some stuff on the marketplace is old, and while you can get an idea of just how old it might be, and old is not automatically bad, it's not always clear.

You can spend a lot of money on keyboards and mice, and they wear out. It's always worth having a cheap spare, but don't expect the really cheap hardware to last.

I suppose we should be glad the RC system does catch some mistakes.

I have seen mentions of Blender tools which do this, most recently this free one. I've never used it. so I don't know how well it works, but it gets so frustrating when somebody says something like this without any pointer to a method, not even a link to a relevant page in the Blender documentation. https://github.com/SavMartin/TexTools-Blender/

With the current state of the Map system, some activities are very difficult. And the map data which is available is sadly out of date. I don't think anything has changed since the initial construction of the Stilt Homes, we don't even see the regions that made the connections to the rest of the continent. And I have stood in those regions I don't know if I can rely in the info I get from the map system when I click on a location. Are parcel names correct?

OpenGL is now at end-of-life and deprecated by Apple but I have seen reports of problems with recent drivers for some AMD cards. I recommend you check on that first. It may not be an OpenGL problem.