Too many people for a sim restart?

[Vulpinus]

The mainland sim where I have my parcel has just gone haywire, and I had a live chat session to try and get it restarted. That was refused on the grounds that "there are too many people in the sim to restart it."

That's a new one on me. It's been restarted on many occasions with a lot of 'people' in it - in fact all of the people apart from me were bots. Eight of them, seven in one parcel where someone has their 'playground' and another one belonging to the owner of the rental company that owns most of the sim apart from my bit.

How so I know they are bots? Well, the lone one says so in the profile. The other seven are there 24-hours a day from one sim restart to the when they all suddenly appear after the next and they almost never move, just being locked into one pose ball or another.

So, how then do we do a sim restart when it's needed if it's full of bots?

After pressing the matter, I was eventually told that "the number of people has dropped so we can restart it now". Odd, the same number of dots were still on the map, but... at least I got it restarted. This time.

[Qie Niangao]

Linden support may be able to tell they're bots if they're registered as "scripted agents" -- but that's only really required of bots on parcels that are listed in Search. (I don't know if that's the case here; perhaps not.)

For whatever it's worth, I have heard of reluctance to restart a non-empty sim. Not a hard-and-fast rule, but a kind of judgment call they have to make: is the sim sick enough that it justifies disrupting the sessions of everybody connected to the region? If the sim is unusably sick then there's not much to disrupt anyway, and if there's nobody in the sim the decision is easy, too. Otherwise, well... not sure how best to make the argument that it's a long time until the next rolling restart.

[Vulpinus]

Hi Qie, Yes, I get what you're saying. Turned out it was actually me, not the sim (sorry LL, :laughs:)

Weirdest thing I've seen though...

I had done a windows update and updated my nVidia driver earlier in the day, something I do on a two-week schedule, and completely forgotten about that. Something in that broke SL completely, on both Firestorm and official.

I could log in, but got a strange SL error message like "could not save DEFAULT OBJECT SETTINGS...". Then my sim loaded fine and everything in it seemed OK, but I could not see anything beyond my sim. Trying to cross the border either made me shoot off into the distance until my browser logged out, or I just bounced off the border like it was the world's edge. The official viewer most often just immediately died when I tried to cross. TP'ing had odd results too, where I would end up at <0,0,0> in my own sim again, or just crash after waiting.

I would have thought that crossing a border was a server-side thing, and since it happened in both viewers I thought it must be server related. Eventually though I remembered my earlier updates, and did a rollback. All fine again.

Now I'm afraid of doing an update...

[SteveCanDo]

The benchmark for LL to restart a mainland region used to be fewer than 10 avatars.

[Lucia Nightfire]

https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/BUG-6455 may be of interest