bay city questions

When I look at the bay city info hub I never see less than 50 people....how is this possible? Are they sharding the servers? At one time there was even a report of 90 people! And if they are able to get that kind of performance out of koda why is docklands so screwy? Someone once mentioned rumors that LL was to fix docklands any body know more about this? And how would they do that?

Can't answer the Docklands performance question, but as to the mechanics of cranking up the avatar limit of a Mainland region: yes, LL can do that selectively. Way back when there used to be town halls, they'd regularly up the limits on the four sims that converge at the Pooley stage. And I've certainly been dumped into other infohubs (Korea and Calleta, at least) with way more than 50 avatars, so perhaps infohubs just automatically are set to higher agent limits. When it happens, it's no picnic, as a visit to Hau Koda will demonstrate.

And there is a known problem with Hau Koda getting a disproportionate share of the distribution of agents to infohubs. It's come up at every Jack office hour for a month or more. LL is supposedly working on it.

In a normal setup a sim is running on a dedicated processor-core on a 4 core server. The agent limit (avatars) are then set to max 40 for the sim.

By allocating more cores (up to 4) to a sim, it is possible to fit 100 avatars into a sim.

As far as I know, Docklands is running on one core with an agent limit of 40. (I have land there so I am impacted...)

In addition, since the landing point for Hau Koda is very close to Docklands, the two sims keeps spamming each other with update events as avatars on each side of the sim border can see what is happening in the other sim. The setup is far from ideal to put it mildly.

Honestly I can understand the info hub getting more than it's fare market share of avatars . The entire 'estate' of bay city is IMHO one of the most wonderfull mainland places as far as design and look including bothh LL's side as well as user builds. Unfourtunately LL's way of showing it off as they should destroys performance in a embarrising way

I can tell you it is not intentional, and Bay City has some pretty nice scenery and builds!

My understanding of the issue at hand is a combination of people setting home to the infohub(s), so that alone sends more traffic in the direction of attractive locations. The second part of the equation is that there is no true load balancing mechanism in place, but traffic is allocated to the western-most infohub first till it fills, and then to infohubs to the east. Hau Koda happens to be the infohub furthest to the west on the map, so the traffic algorithm first tries to send an avatar there.

A new load balancer must both take into consideration people's home locations and the true load of every Infohub sim, but you dont have any real guarantee it will work if people just TP back to the infohub where their friends are, and have set home. It is a tricky one.

My hunch for Hau Koda is that moving the main building and landing point to the other side of the sim would improve the situation somewhat in that it would reduce sim-to-sim chatter and maybe encourage the visitors to venture into a larger section of Bay City and not just be displaced into Docklands.

Wouldn't it be an easier to place people, instead of filling the furthest west to east only moving to the next when one is full, to instead desposit one to each infohub west to east in order to promote a fair balance of new user traffic across the grid and just skip over ones that are full?

Is that possible?

I don't think they do that because I don't think the sim code is multi-threaded, from which it follows that not much would be gained. There may be some small advantage to just idling the other cores, however, thereby reducing bus contention, etc.

You'll find no disagreement here!

The way it has been explained is that the load is coming from the way LL allocates people to hubs -- if you are trying to get to an island and are "moved to a nearby region," it tries to picked the closest. Hau Koda (and formerly Moose Beach) tend to be the "closest" to a large majority of the island estates. This explanation, however, does not include why so many of the people hitting that hub are new users who would not likely be visiting a specific island.

From the user standpoint, it is a mess; from a landowner standpoint, it's even worse.

LL has said they're working to resolve this, but no idea of how they're doing that.

LL just needs to dump these crashed sim avatars onto self contained islands. I know a fellow next to Moose Beach that has begged DPW to fix the issue about the MooseBeach overflow making his land inaccessible. They told him there was nothing they could do about it. SO he says he has land he cannot access and cannot sell to anyone. I hope soon LL shows some more respect for their premium account holders.

Yes a shame that LL is seriously hurting peoples investment in what was a great product....currently I see properties in docklands at 30L a sqm cheaper than most other bay city properties and still sitting there

Simply untrue, otherwise Private Islands (which can have up to 100 avs and is settable in estate tools) would be running on more than one core. Each Private Island only runs on one core still. There are no sims (mainland or otherwise) that run more than one core. Homesteads and Openspaces run 4 per core (as of last time they told).

Honestly whatever they are doing for the infohub is whatever and all LL land anyways........but the surrounding sims seem to be getting screwed in recourse

Infohubs should, in my opinion, be on a region that is 100% dedicated to the infohub.
There are not enough infohubs for this to impact LL's profit model one bit.

Or four of their own reigons like how ahern is set up at the corners

Agreed, though I was thinking of single region InfoHubs when I posted that

Agreed. The trouble with the one in question is that it borders a Residential sim, and the overflow spills out into that neighboring sim. I suspect this would not be nearly as much of an issue (and probably even a good thing, to an extent) if the hub region itself was not seeing a regular load of 40+ agents. It leads to an overspill that is 20+ agents impacting the performance in the residential sim.



I suspect his Moose Beach issue was "fixed" when Hau Koda opened, simply moving the issue 3 sims over. Causing hell in Docklands now.

Yes, I am familiar with 'hub in question. More thought needed to be put into this. Perhaps these hubs should have been placed more out in the water such as the new one near me at Degrand. I know that is only a small one but a similar idea could have been done as both 'hubs being discussed here are near large areas of water or space for water to be expanded into.

While in the road outside my infohub I heard some noobs say "I like this CHATROOM, I am not going back to Yahoo". So our new residents see Second Life as one big social network chatroom and content in between. Linden Lab cannot go wrong if they just go along with them. Rez these 'chatroom' islands away from the paying customers and advertise them as such. But give the rest of us a much needed break already.

Hau Koda is now the default dump for new avatars it seems. Moose Beach before that.

One of the difficulties that the landowners adjacent to Moose Beach experienced was that when Moose Beach was full, avatars would queue on the sim border waiting to get in, and people sometimes get a little bored standing in queues, and so while they're waiting they start playing with stuff on parcels that allow build. Apparently the same is now true of those sims surrounding Hau Koda.

As to how LL currently distribute new avatars is perplexing. When I exited the Help Island, I chose to go to Mauve Infohub (which I assumed would be assigned as my Home) and yet when I logged out and back in the next day to my Home, it was set to Moose Beach. Something has been changed in how that works now. Probably not for the better.

And has bay city alliance been pressuring for this to be fixed?

It's been a big topic at the meetings and stuff, yes. Makes Docklands a bit of a challenge, after all.

I asked a newb once whether he picked Hau Koda or if the just ended up there. He ended up there.

Hanging out with newbies at Docklands - well some aren't that new anymore. Several have adopted the intersection outside the NCI infonode. They're very nice, although still getting a little TOO much of a kick out of audio bling. None of them were griefers though. I was on for 90 minutes and there were no incidents. One of the adoptees had a thing for art deco and loved Bay City in general. Never know if any of these could be future residents or rentees.

As for the load, well it is kinda silly to situate the resources so close to the border. If the buildings were closer to a harbor from where the newbs could fly to any of three regions, Docklands wouldn't have had to carry the bulk of the load.

I kinda like their WA idea of four regions with the center corners sharing the resources and naturally dispersing the load. It should be applied to future Infohubs if they can't solve the distribution issue.

As for chatrooms, wouldn't it make sense to bring people into SL who are looking for a better place to chat? If they should chat in a 3D virtual locale, let it be here.

158 people @ Hau Koda right now! WTF O_o

All the forum posters gone to have a look?