arabellajones

Here is nought at venture, random nor untrue Swings the wheel full-circle, brims the cup anew.

It can be hard telling whether a region is on the Tuesday or Wednesday sets. I am pretty sure my Home region has switched, but as long as they're running the same Server version I can't be sure. Depends on which regions are on the same hardware server, but "Expect the unexpected" almost has to be the rule.

There are the possibly automatic status notices for rolling restarts, and a new status notice for work on the inventory servers at 7sm Tuesday. Maybe no rolling restarts Tuesday. Whatever they are doing, I shall expect problems.

I am not sure map updates are reliable yet. They had some big map problems last year.

It looks as though the first named-placeholder regions have been deployed, NW of the Chalet homes. Right now, zoom-level seems to be a factor, the usual oddities around map-tile updates. A couple of old regions were in the space, private islands, either gone now or in new locations.

About an hour until the Main Channel restarts begin. It's good to hear something, but I admit I am worried. It was a while before I realised some of the old Second-Life-specific info sources have changed. I think I know why I missed the introduction of the Second Life on Google Calendar because of some local problems I had. That's better than the old wiki-based info pages on the user-group meeting, and it might be worth adding rolling restarts. I hope things to work OK this week, For the user groups, the locations used on Tuesdays maybe ought to be on the RC Channel, and the various Wednesday user groups should use an MC Channel region. Though I see we have UG meetings, both days, held in Denby region.

There's a few things that can help. Short draw distance, turn down the graphics quality, the default settings can be optimistic... I use Cool VL Viewer sometimes. That does have a significant frame-rate improvement. It doesn't have the built-in AO that firestorm has, but for some crowded events that may not matter much. It does already have some of the performance improvement features.

There are other game engines, such as Unity. They may all have the same general optimisation problem which can afflict Second Life. There were design choices made in the early days of Second Life which would likely be made differently now. How many multi-core processors were around in 2002? How fast were our internet connections? The world has changed. I do wonder if the people who succeeded in that old world are the people to cope with the new one.

1: RC Channel Restarts are in progress. 2: Regions have, so far, been successfully restarting. 3: Restarted regions have not changed server version. They're still on 2022-01-06.567269

We have zero idea of where there is an actual new server version, though the RC Channel restarts have begun. It's another dose of wait-and-see.

Arguing about what just to call the Tuesday roll-out feels like pointless hair-splitting. Here we are, Wednesday morning, with the automatic Status announcements warning of restarts on the RC Channel, and nothing else. I don't expect anything like a full explanation of what went wrong, not yet. There is a sustained pattern of poor communication by the Lindens, and there was a period when it was plausible that no restarts would happen. There was no new server code waiting on the RC channel, everything had been restarted the week before, and the Lindens hadn't bothered to say anything by the end of their previous working day. Living where I do, with the timezone difference, can exacerbate the problem of silence. That's where I would point to poor performance, a repeated pattern. They have a saying in Chicago: "Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it's enemy action." So what is going to happen today? Can we trust the automated warnings on Status? Is it a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing?

It looks as though the Grid has mostly recovered, only Zindra continent looks to be heavily hit now. I suspect most of the avatar blips visible there are essentially bots, maybe not fully automated, but normally afk and sitting on pose balls.

Short summary: pre-announced restarts began at about the expected time. Region servers stopped, and none of them restarted. If you were trying to log in to a region that is down, you may end up in a different fully working region. You may not. I am using Firestorm and loaded OK, but it wasn't quite as I expected. I know where I would usually arrive as an alternate.

Regions are staying down for a long while. The in-viewer map functions can be a bit laggy, but they're showing a very large percentage of the mainland Grid as down. And all continents. I know one region went down at 6:28 and is still down at 7:11 This could be a map problem. But concurrency has dropped below 26k, which is unusual, about twice the usual drop from the starting point.

Regions are restarting.

I am from England. Time zones come into it. I have just seen the one-hour warning on Status. I am from northern England, and while we usually have an ample supply of words for the responsible Lindens, most the wrong length to use for Wordle,, current British politics has led to much depletion of vocabulary. The Lindens should not feel pleased that they are competing with Boris Johnson. Meanwhile, lurgi strikes Britain, but at least we don't have the blues... You can't get the woad, you know.

I am not sure why alpha maps seem to slow things down. With more than one alpha map, there's a server process to generate the baked map. Add an alpha map or remove one, and the texture greys out for several seconds before loading. Sometimes I see the full skin texture poking through, rather than a grey tone. But that's distinct from the delays I see affecting the appearance of rigged mesh. I don't know how the texture baking is done, beyond "It's a server process." Several different servers must be talking to each other, but we're told the viewer only sees the baked texture at the end point.

I've been noticing slow loading of avatars since the most recent server roll-out. It may just be me. But a bit of wild speculation. Items default to attaching to the Right Hand. For rigged mesh, clothes and mesh bodies, the rigging system makes everything show in the correct place. Does having everything on the same attachment point slow down the loading process? It doesn't seem crazy to think that each attachment point loads items one at a time.

1: It does look as though my home region has been switched from RC Channel to Main Channel 2: A different RC Channel region I know of did restart this morning. 3: There have been other signs of an outbreak of restarts, such as a concurrency drop over the right timewindow. If the promised/threatened new version is put up on the RC Channels next week, we will be able to tell the difference, using the server version number. I am not inclined to trust any announcements that may be made.

There are signs that something happened this morning. But what?

The only way of telling if a region is on an RC Channel is if it restarts on a Wednesday, of if the RC Channels are on a different server version. Since they are now on the same server version, we're left in the dark. I was sure, from past restarts, that my Home Region was on an RC Channel, but it restarted on Tuesday. The plan is described as "All of the RC regions will be bounced and remain on the same version as the previous week." That's a phrasing I have never seen before. Inara Pey, in the Modemworld Blog reports on the SUG meeting, where it was confirmed that there would be nothing happening on Wednesday. The Status page announcement of Rolling Restarts for RC Channels is still current at the time of writing. That inestimable vulpine gentleman, William Tare Fox, recommends that I do not trust any news coming out of Linden Lab.

So all regions will be running the same config and server code, and will have restarted Tuesday/Wednesday. Which is a solid starting point for 2022. But I have lost track of the situation about the auto-restart code that applies the 10-day rule. It was being very unreliable. The long run over Christmas and New Year suggests that the 10-day limit is a lot less significant (practically, 10 days is an effective 2-week cycle, catching regions that have had manual restarts requested.)

One thing to check, on the BoM mesh body, is how the alpha map is handled. The usual three options are Alpha Blending, Alpha Masking (with a numeric setting) and None. I am not sure that every BoM mesh body allows these to be changed, but if they don't I can't see how the permissions would work. The None option, and Alpha Masking set to zero, would block alpha rendering. I did notice an Alpha Map doesn't use the recently introduced new face for one arm, which allows a classic avatar to have differently-textured arms. I was able to work out a fix for that particular mesh body/clothing combination, and I can see how somebody could mess up the critical Alpha settings.

I did a little more exploring, and there is an undocumented road along the south edge of Osiliers that links Routes 8A and 8C. It could be continued westward to the coast.It looks like it has been around for a long time, but there have been changes. The southern end of this section of Route 8C involves those non-existent bridges across the lake to connect to Route 8. Some people have a strange idea of fun.

I am not sure this is the place to even mention this, but back in Mid-December there was a bug-report/feature-request running on completing Route 8 through the Dammastock region. It was one of those awkward gaps in the road network for Satori, with teleport links for avatar use in the guise of tunnel entrances. There was at that time a strip of road-like protected land, while most of the rest of the region was Linden-controlled Abandoned Land. The bug-report/feature-request was "accepted", and no news since. I can confirm that the road connection has been completed. The two rez zones in the adjacent regions are still there, but the fake-tunnet teleporters have gone . There are a lot of changes visible on the map, apparently part of the very large City of Angels project (which includes airports). This gives Satori continent a quite large road loop, but I wasn't able to find any announcement that the work had been done. You may have seen a mention of the change in one of the in-world groups that arranges collective drives, but it all feels like the all-too-common hbit of the Lindens doing something and forgetting to tell anyone. Sorry, I get grumpy about that. Anyway, now you know.