Inconvenient server restart times for Asia/Oceania

[Professor Merryman]

There have been restarts happening from 5AM every Tuesday. This is an inconvenient time for people in Asia/Oceania. It is around 9pm in this time zone. Tuesdays are also a popular day for classes. Many Tuesdays we have had to cancel classes with 20 avatars in attendance. Is it possible to do restarts regularly, I mean at a specific time every week, say from 8am SLT? This would be 12AM in Japan, Korea, and a large part of China, Australia, and New Zealand. It would be nice if we could plan around server restarts.

[Marigold Devin]

Hi, Professor Merryman. You should go have a word with Oskar Linden about this. The weekly deploys/restarts are his domain. Latest ones planned for this week here http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Second-Life-Server/Deploys-for-the-week-of-2011-06-06/m-p/914485 

[Mystie Slade]

It really has been really hard especially on newbies who had just joined SL and came to our activities.  They don't what was going on getting terrible lags for a couple of hours, then we were suddenly kicked out without a warning.  When we came back we all lost our voice and still in a terrible lag.  At last we thought we were back to normal after a couple of relogging, we got the message that the region will restart in 5 mins.  The LindenLab really needs some strategy.  Do a whole SL restart, closing down for 15-30 mins everyday at exactly the same time, so that people can make plans around it.  Or, PLEASE change the time of restarts to different times of a day each time so that it won't affect one particular area on the globe?

[Lora Tachikawa]

The need to restart the land is understandable. Sorry is that it takes place in the top of our business. When most of the avatars come, then they are expelled. This can discourage! Please note that the activities of Cypris is not only a great free language training, but also advertising for SL. After each lesson Mandatory avatars visit the many other links in SL .... well, unless you are expelled, and they can not. :womansad:

Please do not hesitate to think about the matter.

Lora Tachikawa

[Qisreen Elton]

I live on the Asia part. Last night my time and at 5am SLT , I had to tp from sandbox to sandbox because the sims keep on restarting at each different timing on the same day. Had to take back and rezzed the builds again and again. That was an individual hardship which was nothing serious. I can imagine if events that were schedule at that time- fashion shows, classes like Cypris Chat . It would be dissapointing to face the same restarting each week. Around servers restart is a good solution.

[DukeVan Acker]

It just makes sense to cycle downtime at different times of the day.

[Ayesha Askham]

@ Professor Merryman

There is a perennial issue here.  Convenient for one timezones is inconvenient for others. 8am SLT is 4pm in the UK and 5-6pm in much of Europe...very inconvenient.  So they're damned if they do and damned if they don't.  5am SLT is an early start for Linden Lab, but happens slap bang in the middle of a European day.  We have little choice but to plan around it.

  Restarting all the main grid sim hosts is a long process, and cannot be done all at once easily...They tried and it was a disaster...remember when SL was virtually dead for a couple of hours on Restart day?

As things stand we know Main Grid Roll will occur around 1pm BST/GMT on a Tuesday, so we plan around it.  I'm afraid it is that simple.

[Marigold Devin]

*applauds* Nicely put, Ayesha.

[Hitomi Tiponi]

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Qisreen Elton wrote:

I live on the Asia part. Last night my time and at 5am SLT , I had to tp from sandbox to sandbox because the sims keep on restarting at each different timing on the same day. Had to take back and rezzed the builds again and again. That was an individual hardship which was nothing serious. I can imagine if events that were schedule at that time- fashion shows, classes like Cypris Chat . It would be dissapointing to face the same restarting each week. Around servers restart is a good solution.

---

The RC (Release Candidate) sims and main grid servers restart on different days, and there are some sandxboxes on the RCs as well.

[Oskar Linden]

This topic has had much discussion internally at the lab. The decision to use the times that we chose for grid upgrades was not made lightly. We looked at SL usage times over the course of the 168 hours in a week that we have. The slots chosen were specifically chosen at the lightest possible times. We wanted the impact to be as minimal as possible. We know that a rolling restart does offer a noticeable impact on events and those using Second Life at that time. We have attempted to alleviate the impact in three ways.

1. We do rolling restarts during off peak hours.

2. We schedule the rolling restarts for the same time every week so people can plan around them.

3. We work to make the rolling restarts as quick as possible.

 

My hope is that in "The Glorious Future" we can have a system for grid upgrades without downtime. A few ideas around this have been proposed internally, but nothing has been decided. I do appreciate your patience during our rolling restart scheduling.

Thanks!

__Oskar

[WolfBaginski Bearsfoot]

These restarts can even be helpful, sometimes. Maybe it's hard to tell, with the code changes, just what gets cleared up by the restart, but I've known "ghosted" AVs trapped at a region boundary (possibly some sort of Bot), and restarts clear that.

I suppose it's hard to avoid awkward restart patterns, with multiple sims on the same machine, but it does seem to me that the non-RC restarts are too big a lump, with no easy way of predicting the timing. My home is in an RC region, and I've got a pretty good prediction of the timing. Looking at the Status lags, the RC rollouts look to fit into hour-long blocks pretty well (though you look to have started earlier than you'd announced on the 8th).

So if there were three or four main-channel servers, code-identical but with different labels, and you announced that Block 1 restarts would begin at 5am, Block 2 at 6am, and so on, it would be easier to plan around. 5 hours is a big block of time to plan around, even if the time-block is off-peak.

And I don't think it would ne a bad thing to have a few minutes of planned slack in every hour, a chance to take stock on how the roll-out is going. Is the current Main Release Channel block too big to properly manage?

 

 

[Professor Merryman]

Thank you Oskar and others for replying and giving us all a better understanding of how restarts are being handled. It was really nice to hear this matter is of concern, beingst most of Asia COULD be affected by it if were were part of the 'peak' time. Knowing that the restart times will happen at a certain...and I reiterate...certain time, really helps. If these times occur regularly then we can plan accordingly. It would be even better if those times could be more precise rather than "starting at 5am" and then 90 minutes later the sim is restarted. To me that means we are down for about 2 hours. Nothing can be planned during that time. I do realize it is difficult to execute server batch restarts.

As for moving our sim to a beta server. $300 dollars a month to host a not-for-profit community is extremely steep. Even $125 a month is difficult for a community under 1,000 people. We're growing and truly hope to be able to afford an island sim, but that just isn't possible at the moment for us. Nice to know the info though, thanks.

May I suggest one idea that could help, if sims were offered an option int he region/estate settings to choose their peak usage time, then the server restart team could query blocks of servers according to the their average peak times. For example, In the Estae/Regions setting I would choose "Japan" from a drop down under Peak Usage Timezone. Does this make sense?

Thanks for the reponses and all the best. Time to go change our calendar. :-)

 

[Ayesha Askham]

@ Professor Merryman and Wolfbaginski

 

The concept of batches of sims hosts being restarted at a specific one-hour slot is a very attractive one, I must say, but I suspect logistical issues might preclude that.  Any comment Oskar?

Mind you, today won't see any Main Grid Roll since there are "Late issues" to be sorted out, so perhaps, Professor, your classes will be undisturbed (unless you cancelled them because of the Scheduled Roll...:matte-motes-dont-cry:

What I am also impressed by is the way that this topic has been discussed without any silliness or flaming, and with the active contribution of a Linden - Two or three years ago I would not have thought such a thing possible!:smileyhappy:

[Mystie Slade]

I'm grateful that this post has been receiving attention and taken seriously.  However, I still feel it is not very fair for Asian people even if we are not the major population in SL.  From around 5-8am is our time of living SL.  If it is taken away, SL will lose more people from this region because it is just not convenient.  I think we should "share" the inconvenience in the world, including the LindenLab working hours. lol 

They could probably schedule the downtime in the midnight in SL, probably around 1-3am, which means most of the people in US should be asleep, still very early for Europe, early enough for Asia for main activities.  How about that?  I suppose I'm being selfish, but I just have to ask, with all my heart.  I love what we have in SL, I love what we have in Cypris Village.  People from around the world DO make their time to come join our activity.:matte-motes-bashful-cute:

[Ayesha Askham]

@Mystie

Yes, I understand your point, but do bear in mind the very real people who would have to work at those hours to do the software share-out to the sim hosts.  Linden Lab (for good or ill) is very cost-conscious and having skilled programmers or even tekky oiks working at that hour would be costly for them.

 

However, considering how tech-oriented the Far East (to us) is, it might be wise of Linden Lab to give your case consideration.  On past performance I wouldn't hold your breath!:matte-motes-wink: