JoyofRLC Acker

Minutes of a meeting would fall under the category of "Documentation", yes? <-- slap wrist for cynicsm

My apologies if Ive missed it, but I dont htink I see anything in here to address the excessive Bandwidth usage / log spam problem(s). I had thought something was supposed to be released this week to fix those? (And afik they are grid wide; at the very least they are happening on main channel sims without pathfinding, and afik elsewhere as well, ie Blake Sea generally).

Yikes, I thought all bandwidth metrics were bits. This particuular gizmo has not hint on this point; but I suspect youre right.

Cully (and others) - Im now quite confused on the technical side. I have been using Bitmeter OS today to check my BW usage, and its reporting rates that are very significantly lower than what is reported by SL stats bar. (Obviously I have to get another meter to x-check make sure that BitMeter is accurate). This raises the possibiity of thorttling by my ISP. I had previously commenrted that my daily usage as reported by my ISP was up but by nothing like the extend impled by the SL bandwidth numbers, and not enough to encroach on my monthly limit. So this may be why the level f complaints about real world $ or caps coming into effect has been fairly low (it seems). This sort of confirmed my gut feeling (not having done the maths I admit) that - assuming the stats bar BW numbers are correct - something else other than log file spam must be going on, text spam seeems unlikely to generate multiple MPBS of traffic (I hit 5+ MBPS in Blake the other day admottedyl with a highish DD of 800m). So the spam is a POSSIBLE symptom it seems ot me not the cause of the BS figures. IF they are accurate. Perhpas the stats bar is wrong... So, yes, being throttled (unexpected;y) is not good (and may explain the increased rate of client crashes Im getting with non trivial draw distances). But perhpas not quite as exptreme as a 2 or 2 digit extra bill at thend of the month or suddenyl being capped. I agree with the thrust of what you say about customer service etc and LL communication, but my final reaction will depend on what the problem (and fix) turn out to actually be.

Fascianting! According to Bitmeter, the BW coming through to my computer is nothing like what the stats bar is reporting (300 KBPS versus 1700KBPS +). This might explain why relatively few people are seeing a real world problem. Can any one tell if this is due to erroneous figure in stats bar, or some sort of throttling by ISP? If the latter, would that be casue of the more freqent client crahes Im seeing? (SL trying to pour more down the pipe than will fit). https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-oS2JD05aAb0/UDJKBfLm9aI/AAAAAAAAAQs/qrzPEH4YpSo/s800/bw%2520pic.jpg [/iurlg]

ISP Capping would not wait till end of month! $ bills yes. And I agree perhpas people just will take a while to clue in. What ppl are saying about the JIRAS is rather scary ... I guess i hae to start attending server offcie hours again. Friday in Blake I was RDing a race to had to have my DD way out to track the fleet, at dd = 800 I was getting BW over 5 MBPS. But the daily tally according to my ISP was only 3 GB (Im usually between 1 and 2 GB). I was also crashing a fair bit. (Normally I have DDarond 250 - BW used to be 100 - 300 KBPS at that setting now its around 1500 - 2000 KBPS).

Various thoughts: Colour me naive but I think an external monitor would be an exellent thing. It would be good to veryfy that the stats bar BW is not incorrect. The spam (variius flavours) is undenaible, I wonder too how cleints cope with large log files. I have a nasty feeling this is going to turn out to be a very subtle / deep / obsucyre "bug". I am surprised it isnt creating more comment (the JIRA votes / watches are not all that high and its only classed as sever not showstopper.

What I find very strange is that the relevant JIRAS on this issue (there seem to be two and a nice little argument back and forth as to their purity / dupliaction) are not particularly high in terms of votes or being watched, If I read the various comments correctly, at least a few people have had ISP billing or cap issues already. Given the very wdiespread nature of the problem, Id have thought more people would be affected by now. Left unchecked SL viewership numbers would be down. In my own case, while I am seeing at least one order of magnitude increase in bandwidth (unless I throttle DD right back to well under 100m) I am not seeing humngous increases in my daily bandwidth as reported by ISP. Its hard to be preicse as other things are going on with my connection, but most of the time SL probably dominates (I do very little media streaming at the moment). So - heres a question - I assume that the statistic most people are complaining about is BW as reported by the stats bar. Is there any possibility the stat is being reported incorrectly? There seems little doubt that spam is up. But I wonder if that can account for the apparent BW increaes. 3 or 4 MBPS is a LOT of spam (text). Another fact is that I have stated getting a lot of client crashes (Phoenix). Perhpas that is due to the spam ... my log file has hit 3MB several times. Also we have several differnt flavours of spam, it seems. Common cause, or not? Just wondering if this problem(s?) is more complex than it (they) seem(s). I am most intgerested in how many people are seeing actual increases in their BW as measured by the ISP.

Im no expeert on this but Im fairly sure the BW issue is main channel. I was getting it at my Home on Port au prince which is main channel and surrounded by main channel sims. Yes, its very tied to draw distance, in a stepwise manner however the DD step points did not seem to match distances to the sim edge. I was also getting different spam messages in the server log than the ones cited in the JIRA. Im sure that people far more expert than I are getting proper diagnostics on this. If the consequences are as people say (excessive ISP billing or capping) then its hard to see how this is not a showstopper, or worse. Once the lawyers get a hold of this, LL will have some real problems on its hands. On a more general note, we have yet another example of the fatc that "4 releases a week" is just plain IMPOSSIBLE to effetcively manage in terms of QA etc. PLEASE LL - adhere to less is more -- less releases = more efffective SL experience for all of us who just want to have fun in SL. (NOT saying No releases, just fewer, more controlled and better tested).

Thanks Oscar! I'm feeling a bit confused (stupid?) right now. My memeory may be playing tricks but the RC rollouts look the same as last week? I mus be mixed up?

I was having a spate of client crashes a week or so ago (somtimes just 10 minutes after logging in and while not doing anything special). Looked at a number of things bt being SL one can hardly ever do a true controlled experiement. But it looks like the fix was resetting my router. Various people had suggested lowering my bandwidth from its usual 1000 but not one could explain why that would suddenly become a problem. I did, it didnt seemt o help and now its back to 1000. I have heard others talk of lag currently, but myself havenot experienced any particlarly bad lag. But Im tendng to stick to the Estate I live in at the moment (Sailors Cove) its allMain Channel so no versin discrepancies to cope with. We had mesh boats in our race yesterdy, and NO PROBLEMS. So Id agree its dependant on where you are.

Just wondering when the bill of fare for tis weeks rollouts will be posted. Wondering what to expect ?

As has been mentioned elsewhere the issue is why they use the chequerboard approach to distributing the different channels. Ths appriach guarantees that Blake Sea for example will be severely hampred for the maximum amount of time. The solution is to stay in estates like Sailors Cove which is on main channel sims only and also is, afik, eschewing Pathfinder. Ive been sailing my mesh Ktaba Teleri SX all around theere with no problems.

Am I correct that the havoc (ie mesh region crossing issues and other surprise delights) will not start till tomorrow Wednesday? ie that is when the Havok partial grid upgrades will start? I had thought that was begiunning today but reading these notes it suggests its tomorrow. What if any issues can we anticipate for non-mesh vehicles?

Hmmmm - wanted to try LslPrebut Norton but Norton removed it when I ran, saying its a security threat doing suspicous activities? Any comments?

Another comment that is made in the same breadth as it were is, if you use a wireless LAN inside the house set max BW at 500. Thats in spite of the fact that if I run speed tests on my pc (on the wireless lan), I get download speeds in the 14 - 20 MBPS range. Even the slow data centre in the deep south (I forget which) doesnt ususally go below 8 MBPS. Is this another myth? Standing back a bit ... there is a tun of settings that we each need to optimise for out setup. In many cases the advice seems to be. try it and see. (EG http textures). But we can never really do controlled experiments to be sure that when we change something the benefit we see (or not) is due to precisely that factor; as opposed to some persion with a gazillion scripts or prims logging off or leaving the region.

Oskar ... just want to confirm there was no deploy or rolling restarfts today. Sailing this afternoon (well, 11 am SLT) was decideldly choppy with lag, sim border issues and skippers thrwon overboad.and other "crashes". Wondering whats going on?

My apologies to all concerned and especially Oskar (thanks for running a very helpful forum here) but Im not sure if this is the best place for this enquiry (but I think its not the worst so ill start here).... Im trying to get the overall picture of everything that is happening, from the perspective of a (sshhh) Sailor. Yes one of the rabble thats been trying to understand whats happening (re: lag and sim xings). We heard late last week that "stuff" was about to happen to improve things but it might have some initial pain. (Ultimate source Vale Linden supposedly)/ Wasnt able to ascertain really what that was. Nothing visible in the fora that I frequent. I see a number of "the usual" type things listed here; and also new Havoc (now there IS a name - who does their marketing?) which, if we are lucky , will have no impact (my words lol). I have heard also that some sims have been moved to "new hardware". Not clear if the new hardward is just 'faster' or if they have stated to make sure that adjacent sims are on servers that are at least in the same building; and also the same server software version. The point is --- MAYBE things are better in Blake Sea (def fewer crashes I think, Lag - not surre) but also mixed reports elsewhere. Sooo ... how do I get the overall pisture of whats going on (re: sim xingsand lag) and what to expect or not). I havent found anythoing in fora about the allged sim hardware changes.

Malate - Are you saying that the simulator versions is a critical issue in boder crossings? (You say that where the versions are the same, crossings are excellent. You do not say explicitly how bad they are when the versions differ). I have long wondered why they went with the chequerboard approach. This sounds like good news though. I think I saw somewhere that havng adjacent sims on serves in the same location (stack?) made a big difference too. Something else that one wonders why it would be otherwise. I think the Group Note referred to the information about Monday coming from a Vale Linden iirc (sorry im not familiar with the Linden family tree).

Nalates I agree with everything you say (although Im not totally clear as to the relevance of your last paragraph). [btw yo better hope that " Lots of time spent testing delays delivery of the product." never gets quoted out fo context LOL]. You are dead right that it is precisely the variety of things that people do that makes testing difficult. That means the corollary is - minimise the amount of required testing. So I come back to - is it wise to be relasing fresh bugs every week? sorry, upgrades. As opposed to batching things up to bigger, less frequent, releases, But they would be propoeryl tested. Or better tested anyway. Just asking a question. ... as an aside , its interesting that we now seem to be seeing some focus on the problems which is good. perhpas they have joined up the dots and realised the contemplated marketing campaign would be much more effective if the inworld experience matches whats being sold.

We have been informed (a post to one of the sailing groups) that some changes are being released Monday to improve sim border crossings - does anybody know what this is exactly?

Regarding the previous post ... I say this with all due respect, and acknowledging that I am no expert on a lot of this technology, but at a very basic level is this not the kind of thing that should be caugh on testing before the change is released? My sense is that this kind of thing happens quite a lot. It's very inefficient, as resources are wasted on the user and the systems side to remedy these "bugs". I remain to be convinced that in geenral we are doing sufficient testing in the current release regime. Im not sure that the rationale for the current regime factors in the resources required for adequate testing. (Basically EVERYTHING that happens on the grid has to be retested EVERY week and more up to 3 times as we have these 3 channels). In thoery if we could analyse reliably the scope as it were of each change a more structured testing strategy could be employed, but its pretty clear that we have limited succcess in indentifying the scope or potential impact of any given change).

Are they that smart, Ayesha? And if you are right, then they now have themselves in a catch-22. They want to promote sailing and similar activities as part of their marketing we are told, so one or another they have to fix this. My own view is that this is simply unintended consequences of one, or more, of the many changes they have brought about over the last year or more. so now we have to drill down, figure out what happened and how it can be fixed. I think this will take co-operation between the sailing community and the tech people to get the right test data.

Are they that smart, Ayesha? And if you are right, then they now have themselves in a catch-22. They want to promote sailing and similar activities as part of their marketing we are told, so one or another they have to fix this. My own view is that this is simply unintended consequences of one, or more, of the many changes they have brought about over the last year or more. so now we have to drill down, figure out what happened and how it can be fixed. I think this will take co-operation between the sailing community and the tech people to get the right test data.

Yes, ayesha, I too wonder where this is all headed. A couple of "chance" remarks in Andrews Tuesday OH (one by him an done by Simon) have def set me wondering. Your comments are dead on I think. It will be ironic if one of the pieces of the "project on region crossing" (which Im still rather in the dark about eve after yesterdays meeting) turns out to be policing of script limits on Homesteads (or even full dims). Do we know wha an acceptable script load is considered to be for an avi or a vehicle? Also, things may not be what they seem. I have a pair of trainers (NO bling!) that has 5 scripts in each shoe, yet a monitoring tool shows each shoe at 470 odd scripts and 7 MB of memory! Whats with that?