Theresa Tennyson

Darleen Emerald wrote: Mastro/Oskar...Could you please give the paying SL residents an update on the current excessive Bandwidth disaster? Any estimate of when we can expect a new server version to correct this? (this coming week? or?) Any recommendations of how to minimize the excessive data rate that connecting to SL is causeing ? Many residents are hitting their internet providers CAPPED monthly DATA LIMIT in less than 2 days! Possibly this is related to idling Sims when no residents are present? Looking forward to hearing at least something........ An informed resident is a happy resident :matte-motes-angry: I've been spending quite a bit of time researching this and here's what I've found out. 1) It's caused when your draw distance hits a neigboring region that's diagonally to the south of the one you're in - i.e. southwest or southeast. For some reason these regions start sending information about their status over and over at speeds that don't respect the bandwidth throttle you've set in the viewer. 2) It does not occur on a region that doesn't have neighbors diagonally to the south - i.e. stand-alone regions or the bottom strip of a cluster of regions. 3) It does not occur if your draw distance and direction of view dont' hit the sims to the southwest or southeast of you. 4) It happens on all server channels - Magnum has nothing to do with it and probably never did. It was first noticed by someone on a Magnum region and people hadn't worked out exactly what was happening so it LOOKED like a problem with Magnum. There is no way it could have "spread" from Magnum this week because the new code on Magnum wasn't promoted to the rest of the grid. 5) Turning dynamic pathfinding on or off doesnt' seem to make a difference. Mainland regions with pathfinding on but no southern neighbors show no increase in bandwidth; private regions that have pathfinding off but have neigbors to the southwest or southeast do (i.e.. the Caledon sims.) 6) The excess information being sent appears to relate to the physical description of the sim. It happens with empty sims as well as occupied ones. 7) This seemed to pop up quite recently - I live on a Magnum sim and did quite a bit of experimenting in the Magnum sandboxes before pathfinding was rolled to the rest of the grid and didn't notice anything like it. It still doesn't occur in the pathfinding test regions on the Aditi beta grid. 8) At the server beta user group on Thursday Maestro said there's a fix being tested on the Aditi beta grid now.

You can create a group with your friends, "edit" your furniture, set it to that group and check the box that says "share." It's also possible to give certain friends the ability to edit ALL your objects but creating a group is probably safer.

The bandwidth problem appears to be caused by having a region that's diagonally to the south of yours in your draw distance, so it mostly appears in the southern corners of Mainland sims or sims in large estates. Happens with all server channels but I think BlueSteel isn't as bad as the others. Shouldn't happen at all in standalone islands and can be controlled in other areas by keeping your draw distance down and staying toward the north of the sim.

Aiden Rives wrote: birds of a feather, birds of a feather. It's alright. I'm leaving SL. You guys are right I don't belong here. bye, enjoy your second life. As long as we're making generalizations about people and SL, I'll offer my observations on how people leave. The ones who ANNOUNCE they're leaving typically return, usually withing a week. The ones who THREATEN to leave unless something changes never actuallly leave, no matter how much everyone else wishes they would. The people who DO leave Second Life? Never. Say. Anything.

I've confirmed that there are bandwidth issues for regions with southern neigbors on all channels but BlueSteel. See this new JIRA: https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SVC-8155

Dagger Ulrik wrote: Did I miss something in Oskar's latest reply where he says this only affects Magnum? I thought it affected all release channels because it affects u if u look into a Magnum region no matter what code the sim u are in is running? Am I wrong about this? If the bad code's only on Magnum fixing it there will automatically fix it on the adjacent sims - no change has to be made to the other channels. (IF the bad code's only on Magnum.)

The skin looks like it may be from Mother Goose.

SOMETHING is causing certain areas in SL to constantly spam messages that are using up a lot of bandwidth. "Ultra" increases your draw distance and the higher the draw distance the higher the odds one of these "hot spots" are going to end up in the area your viewer is tracking. Here's a JIRA about it... https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SVC-8124

It's also worthwhile to note that the new prim accounting system allows a prim-equvalence of up to 64 for a vehicle. I found it faster to set the physics shape of the entire vehicle to "none" first (which will automatically leave the root prim as physics type "prim" and then change the other parts that need to have a physical shape (wheels, for instance) individually to "convex hull" or "prim." I updated a complex sculpted jeep which still works as a vehicle even though it now has a prim equivalence of 44.

That's an "artistic statement" by Eloh Eliot, the creator. She makes all her skins and even the Photoshop files she uses to make them avalable freely on the web and at one time I guess they were on the marketplace for free as well. Apparently she wasgetting flak from Linden Lab (or PERCIEVED she was getting flak, at least) for putting them up for free and having a lot of download traffic with them so she decided to set the price of L$6,000,000 for them but still have them available for free on her personal site.

There's no direct way to post a picture you've already taken to your feed. You can post it to the feed directly from the snapshot interface when you take it, but if it's already on your PC or in your inventory the best you can do is put it on a prim as a texture, zoom in close and take another snapshot. If you post a picture to your feed it's really easy to copy the same picture to your PC though - you can open your profile in your browser and select the picture and save it like you would from any other web site.

My understanding of the accounting is that hollow objects like tubes or torii are hateful for physics calculations which is why they're penalized. However, you can set the physics type to "none" for your tube and put simpler invisible shapes inside it for the walking surface, or you can sandwich together two scooped out half-cylinders.

Both lag spikes and teleport problems are signs of an erratic connection. What kind of internet connection do youhave? SL needs consistent 2-way communication rather than pure speed. Try going to "pingtest.net" and testing your connection to San Francisco.

Chris, everything you're describing is a symptom of connection problems. The ability to access other web sites doesn't really mean anything because most web sites, even video sites, tolerate flaky connections pretty well. SL, however, runs best on a connection that doesn't need to be extremely fast but should be very stable and consistent. It also needs a steady two-way connection - most other web pages don't need much input from your side. Try going to "pingtest.net" and running their test by connecting to San Francisco. The test is one of quality, not speed.

chrisbreitling wrote: The first time it was about 2198 items. After I restartred because my internet connection went down it showed 273 but it didn't update (number was not becoming less). It remained so until I logged out. Next time I logged in the 273 turned 268 but it also remained so... Then it went up to 277 items. So what on earth is happening to this thing? now I can't unpack ANYTHING, clearing the cache does not resolve the issue. The number listed for inventory items will never decrease as your inventory downloads - the viewer doesn't know how many items are in your inventory so the number will increase until it stops. Something is stopping your inventory from completely loading and I suspect it's some sort of connection issue because your problems started right after your internet connection went down. Under the "Develop" menu ("Preferences - Advanced - Show Develop Menu" if you don't see it) there will be an option for "Use HTTP Inventory." Try cnanging the option to the opposite of how it's set now (select it if there's no check next to it, de-select it if there is), clear cache and then go to a quiet location and see if your inventory completely loads. Was 2198 about the number of items you know to be in your inventory? That sounds low but you've got a new accound so it's possible.

What viewer were you using before you started using the pathfinding viewer? Its graphics engine should be basically the same as the standard LL viewer - pathfinding itself doesn't change the display engine. Try clearing your cache or reinstalling your viewer. Also, are your video drivers up to date?

Crashing when editing when wearing rigged mesh is a known problem - here's the JIRA... https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-28329 Your other crashes sound like you may be running out of memory. The standard LL viewer is set up to run on 32-bit systems so it can't use more than about 1.5 gigabytes of memory When it exceeds this it will crash very predictably. It also can cause black textures right before it runs out of memory. The viewer has problems releasing memory so it tends to have its memory use balloon over time. If you're at a crowded area and you're using your camera a lot this amount can be reached fairly quickly, especially if you've got your graphics options turned up all the way. Go to the "Develop" menu and turn on "Show Info - Show Memory" and you'll see if this is the problem. Inventory stuck in a loading condition is another known probjem. Does the item number match what you'd expect your inventory to be but it still says "loading"? If you go into "Develop" and temporarily uncheck "Use HTTP Inventory" when this happens it should stop the unending load and let you rezz things. Slow friends/groups lists loading sounds like either an erratic connection or you may have a firewall that's blocking one of the HTTP channels the viewer uses for background tasks. Make sure that your firewall is allowing "SLplugin.exe" access. Also there seems to be a very large speed difference between uploading and downloading for you - your ISP may be putting on some sort of throttle. SL is unusual in that it needs a constant two-way communication with the servers. Pure download speed doesn't mean much for SL.

Go into "Preferences - Graphics - Advanced - Hardware" and see if "Enable Texture Compression" is selected. If it is, de-select it and restart the viewer. It's a new setting that lets things run better on lower-end computers but can cause blotchy graphics in some situations, especially with ATI/AMD cards.

Jo Yardley wrote: And yes, I know LL is working on this new pathfinder thingy that will make movement for objects a lot easier, but well... when will that be ready? Pathfinding is currently running on the Magnum release channel (about 10% of the grid) and viewers that can be used to set up pathfinding features are available as development viewers and I believe will soon make it to the Beta. Pathfinding should let you do a lot of cool things in Berlin with NPC's - you might try asking to move the sim to the Magnum channel and experiment with it. There are also pathfinding regions on the beta grid that you can experiment with if you don't want to move the sim over yet.

The processors and especially video systems on all those devices would give you extremely poor performance; it's entirely possible that the viewer won't even run. SL relies on the client computer and video card for most of the hard calculations, especially rendering. The minimum requirements for SL haven't been updated lately and if you're at the bare minimum for all you couldn't do much other than log into a sim with little detail and few avatars and stand around. If any of those devices have an input for outside video you might try runnning SL on a full desktop or laptop computer and piping the video into the device. There may be other ways to get around backlit screens too - can you tolerate watching a projected image? You could connect a projector to the computer and use that to see what's on screen.

Luschious Nightfire wrote: So I got this idea the other day, when I tried to log on to SL, to find that some low life using the same ISP as me, and obviously the same IP pool has been banned. This is not a big deal as all I have to do is renew my IP. But this got me thinking, its totally ineffective, if I can bypass it so can the banned individual. Common knowledge really. Back in the day, noobs where locked in at orientation island, and couldn't access the main grid unless they "passed" all the tests. That being said, why cant LL make a prison island for banned individuals? like Australia, lol.. have them log in, but have them restricted to sharing their crappy existance with other griefers/unsavory folks on a secluded island, for as long as it takes for them to serve their prison term. Heehee, they could even get visitation rights if they behave, lol. Actually they used to have one - it was called "The Cornfield." It's still around and there are "tourist" versions of it that you can check out. Part of the problem with it was that people would deliberately cause trouble so that they could check it out.

There are changes being made to how vehicles, etc. work and the changes are being tested on various parts of the grid. Go to "Help - About Second LIfe" and look at the paragraph starting with "You are at..." when you're at your homestead. The last line of that paragraph usually starts with "Second LIfe Server" but it might say "RC Magnum," "RC LeTigre", RC BlueSteel" or :"RC PF" instead of "Server." If that line has one of those entries put that in a reply to this thread. RC Magnum and RC PF are the most likely ones to cause problems. Also, make sure you're rezzing brand-new copies of your vehicles from inventory instead of ones you've driven at other locations. Because of the changes being made, sometimes a vehicle that works in one region will stop working in another, but the problem should go away with a new copy from inventory.

Right now there is one of the periodic cage matches going on between groups who want two fundamentally opposed things. One group wants sea level outside the sim to match custom water levels on the sim and the other wants the sea level outside the sim to stay at the default 20 meters in height even if the water level in the sim is set at a different level. One of these settings is what was the original behavior was meant to be and the other is the result of a long-standing bug that many people got used to and set up sims to take advantage of. This setting is viewer-determined and recently this setting has been changing back and forth in viewers as Linden Lab and TPV providers have been trying to satisfy first one and then the other group. The only way everyone will be happy is if a special setting is added to the options of the sim to determine which behavior is used - this has been proposed by a Linden but there's no ETA on when it will happen.

Go into "Preferences" - "Graphics" - "Hardware" - "Advanced" and see if there's an option for graphics compression and if it's turned on. If it IS on, turn it off. It's an option that saves video memory but can make some textures look blotchy, especially on ATI/AMD video cards. It's usually worse on textures that have little detail and have pixels that are very close but not identical in color.

A couple of months ago the LL server team "rebalanced" the grid, putting regions that traditionally have higher loads on servers with more memory and locating nearby sims on servers that are closer together in data centers. It helped performance for much of the grid and dramatically reduced regions crashing.