How to tell where you're colocated?

Linden Lab has server farms in Dallas and San Francisco. The August 11 blog post, "More info on this week's grid problems" explains that a lot of the issues we were having then (and still having now, to some extent) are due to problems with the secure link between the Dallas and SF facilities. To my knowledge, some of the issues mentioned in that post have yet to be resolved. Anyway, I have some questions related to the colocation facilities:

- If you reboot a sim, is there a chance it will come back online at a different facility? It's my understanding that sims are hosted at both facilities. When you reboot a sim, it typically comes up on a new server. (I've been doing this a lot lately, because with the help of Max Case's Sim Neighbors site, several times I've discovered that my sims have gotten stuck sharing servers with terrible, laggy sims that affect the whole server.) My question though, is can a sim hosted in SF possibly pop up over on a Dallas server after a restart?

- How can you tell where a sim is colocated? We don't really have a reliable way to determine the class of a sim anymore. But is there a way to determine where a given sim is physically located?

I ask these questions because I own two class 5 sims, both with a similar number of tenants, prims, and scripted objects- but the newer of the two has been suffering some very annoying lag lately. I'm wondering whether the geographic location of the sim has anything to do with it.

Well one way is "tracert"

and to answer your question, yes, they do pop back and forth, my sim is in SF right now but was in Dallas a few weeks ago...

[Edit] Oh and as far as bettor or worse performance? Some of my strnagest sim behavior (Such as the avatars not completely rezzing) has been while in SF... so I'm not sure that being in SF is any kind of automatic advantage for keeping the images/net traffic down or anything...

Don't have a ton of data on that though.

To use tracert, you need to know the destination server address though, right? How does one determine that?

All I know about Dallas vs. SF is that if I am permaruthed, all I have to do is log on to a low-population class 3 (all SF, AFAIK) sim and poof, back to normal. I have no idea what sim-specific problems, if any, might be related to the difference.

Traceroute does it; see if the traceroute comes up with Dallas Fort Worth or SF. Not too hard, just plug in the address of the sim you find in Help.

I had all of Caledon's sims co-located to Dallas in one big batch way back in the day, and that did wonders for sim border crossings. Just ask 'em.

Under Help -> About Second Life

You know, Desmond, I remember you saying that, but then Farallon (who posted earlier) said he's seen his sim switch between Dallas and SF.

Could there be some kind of facility lock they place on a sim that keeps it from booting in a different facility?

Also- was there a charge for this service?

I was surprised to see it change locations myself. Mine is also a class 4, maybe if class 5s are ONLY in dallas it will never switch? Don't know...

I was just speaking to a Linden on Concierge chat and she confirmed the following about whether sims can jump between co-location facilities or stay fixed in one place:

"They are fixed in one facility, but not to one server, which is where the confusion comes in. When regions restart they go on the first available server of that class. We try to host all the machines from one class in the same facility."

As of last night my class 5 sims are both in Dallas and my class 4s are both in SF. I intend to check on this a few more times just for peace of mind.

It was free, but, then again, I'm "FIC 2.0"... grins

Honestly I think the concierge team rocks, and will help anyone as much as they possibly can within reason. It's in their interest for the grid to be enjoyable too, and I've never had a single bad experience with concierge services since day one, 18 months ago.

Cyn Linden herself set the main Caledon telehub, back in the day when we didn't have such tools - and I've never washed it since!

Well on the face of it that isn't /absolutely/ true. My sims were moved to Dallas when the facility was opened and remained there for some time. I remember this quite vividly as I specifically checked for it and at the same time the normal sim pings doubled from 30 to 60ms. )The traceroute reveiled that I was going from my home to SF to Dallas). Some time rather recentlly I find my sims back in SF where they started which was a surprise.

BNot paid enougha ttention to know he often or when it happened exactly

SO maybe normally sims don't transfer back and forth. Maybe some kind of manual load balancing is applied occasionaly and sims are hand moved from one plae to anther as machine space is required?