Rolling Restart to deploy 1.24 the week of 2008/08/18

Keep up the good work Prospero; it is appreciated that you guys are keeping the openness going and all the hard work you put in.

Your graphics processor is probably overheating; laptop PCs run hot anyway, due to less space for ventilation, and the CPU throttles and goes into automatic shutdown once a certain temperature level is reached. I'd recommend dialing back your graphics settings. Oh, and get a temperature sensor monitor.

What issues?

I must say, SL has been increasingly stable over the past few months. When there are problems it feels a bit like old home week. The other day I TP'ed somewhere and arrived without my hair. If only I had had my shoes up my ass. Good times!

In any event, the stability is much appreciated. Updates that don't completely bork the entire grid make for a nice change.

On my dell i think there is NO FAN on video card, i have to slow down the processor to send less data to video card. If i run the processor at full speed, video card reach 91-92 °C and then all start to run slow. Slowing down processor keep video card at 70-80°C and everything runs better.

I've a nvidia quadro, a bad one, and for sensing the thermal sensor i use Everest. For slow down the processor i use SpeedSwitch XP.

I hope it may be useful for you too.

(i quoted Vivienne Graves but the answer is for Aluna Sorbet)

hey!
whata shame

sl runs smooth as butter with my iMac/OSX10.4.11, no problems with my sim - i love it, many thanks to all lindens for their hard work.

We understand that a region can move from one host to another, we are ready to take that risk, but if you tell us "SIM1234 will be restarted", we can check if the region we are interested in is on that sim or not, and if restarts let's say 4 hours before the deploy, we have 4 hours for cancel events or so, if you don't say anything, we have 0 hours to cancel it, 4 is still better than 0.

Thank you

btw, are you the Shakespeare's Prospero, or the Dan Simmons' one?

I would bet on this one rather :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Face_in_the_Frost

quick excerpts:
It centers on two accomplished wizards, Prospero ("and not the one you're thinking of" and Roger Bacon, tracking down the source of a great magical evil.

This novel was listed in the "recommended reading" list in the first edition Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, Dungeon Master's Guide by Gary Gygax. Prospero's practice of studying his book of spells the night before he might need them may have helped inspire the game's requirement for magic users to do the same.

Now you have me worrying about "Shrike Linden".

I chose the name "Prospero" in reference to "The Tempest", in fact....

Re: the issues with 1.24.1, the server crash rate is higher than it was with 1.23.4. We still haven't figured out exactly why, although some of the developers in Brighton (who were working last night overnight... or, at least, what is overnight for the US) made some progress on it.

I am curious why you (as in Linden Labs) are putting this pressure on yourself with almost every release. If I remember the last updates updates correctly no one worked according to plan. So why not change the plan? We have been waiting for the changes for months, another week will not hurt. You keep announcing a 3 day update period and extending it again and again. There are very plausibly reasons for the delays (for example odd bugs only showing after the code is run large scale in production. I think most of us a) are aware that SL is a very complex thingy and b) prefer a stable version above the latest features).

I am curious why you don't initially announce an update period of a week for a new release.

I think that because Mono is such a huge deal, they've been putting off other changes - they probably REALLY want to make sure it's ready for prime time and then get it the hell out of the way.

LL is, and has been for a couple years, under a lot of pressure to improve stability and allow more people in at once. Anything that blocks that effort, like say a ginormous project which delays other stuff getting in, is gonna get extra pressure behind it.

To me, this all seems pretty normal for 1-2 releases on either side of something this big..

If things *had* gone well, we *would* have done the rolling restart on the original days announced. We would really like to give as much notice as possible for rolling restarts, so that people can plan for them, and as it is we're only able to give a couple of days notice. So, when we think there's a reasonable probability that it might happen, we announce it.

The current status is that we're testing 1.24.2 on the Preview Grid. We hope to roll it out to the regions current running 1.24.1 in the production Second Life environment today. It is not clear if that will happen this morning or this evening, but I would bet on the latter.

Wouldn't it make sense to have some sort of quality control group of volunteer regions on the main grid to help test these updates for a week or so before trying to deploy them to the entire grid? It is just a suggestion since there always seems to be a difference on how well these updates work between the beta and main grid.

I couldn't agree more with this. Six regions I manage were part of the Havok 4 early deployment, we didn't mind the iffyness - and from what I understand, the early deployment group was a /huge/ part of why the Havok 4 rollout went so smoothly. I was frankly stunned when this wasn't offered for Mono. I know you'ld have hundreds of region owners wanting to help test this one out, especially if the crash rate is only /slightly/ higher.

I'm part of the Baker Street Irregulars (meaning we test the early, pre-RC viewers), was part of the H4 early deployment, hit the beta grid when I can - but given the time between inventory refreshes, it would be a hell of a lot easier to really pound on Mono if it were a H4-style early deployment.

Just my L$0.02 (sheesh, that's ony US$0.000074 - maybe I should offer more)

I have to admit, this latest rollout is much anticipated with the inclusion of Mono. Prospero, we know that the preview grid doesn't get as much use as the production grid. I do wish you luck with the patch to the update. I hope there is no patch to patch the patch that patched the update. Wow, that gets confusing.

(I'm eagerly awaiting the release so I can change all my scripts to Mono. Good luck!)

Edit: I see I spoke too soon. At least you are trying to squash any problems before releasing it full force. Good luck still and to the 300 or so pilot regions, keep up the good work.

I was willing to offer up my sim for use to test the update as well, but never saw a request from LL for volunteers.

i sure hope not going to see that the quality assurance of LL has failed once again!

On the contrary, in the long run quality assurance is what LL is doing for their software. I've often compared what SL does with assets to juggling 300 running chainsaws... well it's difficult to near impossible but somehow SL is still here and open for business
A hearty TY to all the Lindens who keep working on the dream rather than drowning in pessimistic criticisms. Thank you for Havok 4; grid stability is so rockin!! Thank you for Mono and all the benifits to come!!

i imagine that maybe the lab would get better test results by keeping the regions updated fairly randomly instead of 'taking requests', although that's a nice feature for down the road... just there might be some good reasons to keep it that way.

:0 it's funny, whenever the grid goes thru some update pains, inevitably i'm tweaking and updating my own vendor network about the same time... and well the working rollout just -never- goes quite as smoothly as 'on the bench'! ;0 still every iteration seems to make a little progress, sometimes with a bit of 'two steps forward, one back' thrown in...

still gosh, remember when 'update day(s)' meant the whole darn grid getting shut down for hours and hours?? (lol this thread would a whole lot more acrimonious back in those days! ;0)

(prrr rubs her noggin against the love machine ;0) kudos to the lab - it's getting better all the time!! (it can't get no worse... ;0)

Yep..

I also remember, and I ain't very old, the screams that the grid just can't take having 20k people on at once..

At one stage we used to panic and start saving work in progress if it were reaching 10K

If anyone wants to check it out, Blackmount, my home region,runs on 1.24!

I have another question.

If i hit CTRL+SHIFT+1 there is this infowindow.
It does show me "active scripts".

On the new version, will we be able to see "active Mono" and "active LSL" scripts?

That would be a good information to keep informed about the change of usage from both, LSL and Mono.

It's good to know that when things started breaking with 1.24, LL were on top of it, stopped the rollout, and have so far created two fixed-up versions.

And in my year and a half here, things have definitely improved a great deal.

I do want to mention two things.

First, the initial announcement of the rollout said clearly that no trouble was expected. Yet trouble occurred quickly, and while the action to contain the problem was also quick, I have to wonder how naive people at LL would have to be -- or imagine that we are -- to say that no trouble is expected. Come on guys. If you're really that confident, could we set up some kind of a wager? I'd have bought a ticket that said "There will be trouble". Would any of you really have put some Lindens down that it would be smooth? I sure hope not. Surely you knew better.

Second, you talk about how hard it is to test, and I'm sure that sometimes it is. But ... are you following this century's approach to problems, or last century's? Last century development teams would say "Well, stuff happens," try to fix the bug and move on. This century what teams do is to figure out, for every case worth fixing, what the root cause of the problem was, and what to do to prevent that problem, and problems closely related.

The result of doing things in that style is that the software gets better faster and so does the team. The teams I work with find that, and teams all over the web are finding that. You can do it too!

Welcome to 21st-Century SL!

I look forward to playing with mono ... make us all proud!

Thanks!

Janet