Server Releaes Beta : General Discussion

In the Original Beta we were more then happy to help Linden Lab find and squash as many bugs as we could in the time we had, now you are asking for an Open Ended commitment from us? Will you be paying us? Will you be offering LifeTime Accts to those that attend regularly and jump through the PJIRA hoops?

So just exactly what are you offering? Are you going to LISTEN and COMMUNICATE with those that participate?

Will you treat these BETA testers better then you did your OPEN SOURCE developers? Many of whom have abandoned the project because Linden Lab Employee's openly trashed their coding. Will you be any more "Professional" this time around, or act the same way? - THIS IS NOT AN ATTACK, but a statement of fact. If you want, I'll be happy to bring the offended parties into the discussion, but I think that would be even more counter-productive. I'm just asking just how "Professional" you will be during this BETA, I would rather not put in my time and then have you decide I'm not pulling my weight and tell everyone openly; that wouldn't be too professional, like happened before.

I would be happy to Beta Test, seeing I did it the first time around, but, I would really like to get the answers to these questions.

Bob, I think you're an optimist Mmmh, getting a stipend to Mentors... you could add that to your list too But naaah, it's always been the case that LL asks for _volunteers_, never that they get anything in return, except for being mentioned on Help > About Second Life. That's what "volunteering" really means — contributing your time for free.

Prospero, exactly what kind of regions would you like to see on the Preview Grid? I can imagine that you're looking mostly for script-intensive areas, since those are the ones most affected by changes in Mono etc., is that right? So things like popular shops/malls, or event areas with interactive games, would be better candidates than "pretty buildings" with lots of textures?

I'm just asking because I might be able to enroll a few of the latter, but it would only make sense if you're interested in testing geometry and textures, and not scripts. I'm afraid I have no access to script-intensive regions

When it comes to joining the beta group, you can "just join" the Second Life Beta group. I'm not adding anybody to that group -- please add yourselves.

I've received a fair amount of mail with volunteer regions for the pilot roll. I have not been responding to them individually. If when the next pilot roll happens, your region doesn't get included, *please* let me know.

Re: what we want on the Preview Grid : more than regions, per se, we want people to try things on the Preview Grid that there is some chance may have been broken by what's updated. Real Soon Now I will have 1.25 on the Preview Grid, and will also have release notes. That will give you a sense of what changed. The biggest bugaboos, of course, are the things that we broke without realizing we broke, that were related in some non-obvious way to something that was changed.

Ultimately, what we really are looking for is diversity. People use Second Life for all sorts of things in all sorts of ways. We'd like to have a sampling of as much of that as possible during beta testing, so we can find any hidden problems before we start rolling out to the production Second Life environment.

Also, we do this as an opportunity for people to test their stuff if they're worried about what might happen with the new changes, *and* to see if the new features or fixes are working the way they're supposed to.

I guess it was too good to be true to actually HOPE someone at Linden Lab could answer some serious questions.

So, Prospero, NO I won't be joining your BETA, since you can't take the time to answer a few HARD questions, when put to you nicely, then your ranting about me being a "trouble maker" is nothing more then hot air.

The real culprit here is you, and your Censoring ideals. So much for, "I'll try to answer the hard questions", just as well lie here as in person eh?

Have a great time, I expect nothing but failure, just as you have shown it to be in the past.

So, do they have the names of all the Original Beta Members there? We offered up a LOT of our free time to be sure Second Life was ready to rollout when it did, did we get mentioned?

Easy to say that "volunteeing" is just that, until the organization you "volunteer" for doesn't even have the decency to treat you with respect.

Anyone at Linden Lab ever expecting to see me volunteering my free time for them again will come at a cost. That will be your apology to myself and the Community for the way you have disrespected us all over the past few years.

Until then, sorry, I gave at the office.

I have advocated a beta programe since I joined, I applaude your efforts to start one and I plan on spending time on the grid trying to find problems and reporting them. Good job! Lets get those nasty bugs and crush them.

Are there openspace regions on the beta grid, ones with varying performance levels would help. Is there a way to find them? (other than jumping from region to region).
I find some of the issues (particularly the collision problem) can be most easily duplicated in these environments.

I can't be very helpful with this effort (time conflicts with the office hours, but also with getting much in-world time on either grid these days), but I just want to express enthusiasm and thanks for taking this approach. This is what saved Havoc 4 from being the total Main Grid disaster it easily could have been, and why the Mono transition was nearly seamless.

This will save Operations many man-hours of rollbacks on the Main Grid, and improve service metrics. Het-grid made it (relatively) painless to have multiple live server versions, but also made it a little too easy to put out versions that weren't quite ready for prime time and could, someday, create a disaster. By using Aditi effectively, you'll reduce those risks; it's a very smart move.

Hey -- yes, there *are* openspace regions on the Preview grid.

Early next week, I'll try to get the Preview Grid page on the public wiki updated to indicate which ones are openspace.

I believe we talked about this previously Prospero, but Livingtree is on board. I'll send an e-mail to be sure

Regretably, I must retract my offer of support for the beta testing program.

The region which I had formerly volunteered for inclusion in the program will cease to exist in the next few weeks, and I will be too busy managing the business fallout from certain recent policy changes at Linden Lab to spend any time on the beta grid.

There were some posts in this thread not long ago (since deleted) which asked how Linden Lab planned on thanking/rewarding those who had volunteered to help with the beta project. I believe we received that answer from Jack Linden on the 27th.

Prospero, I will follow up this post with an email to you confirming that the region will no longer be available for the beta testing.

-Atashi

Atashi -- I'm sorry you feel that way, but I will take your regions out of the list.

Just as a note -- the changes in the openspace policy have nothing to do with the beta testing program whatsoever. I'm not really equipped to talk about the openspace policy here, so please let's not debate it here-- there is a forum for that.

Regarding the posts that were deleted: they weren't deleted because I didn't want to answer questions. They were deleted because the questions were stated in a rhetorical and hostile manner, analogous to the question "have you stopped beating your wife?" They weren't legitimate questions, they were trolls wrapped around legitimate questions phrased so that it was impossible to acknowledge the question without acknowledging an attack and an insult.

As for what compensation volunteers for the beta program will be receiving: we're not going to be paying people for participating in the volunteer program; this is why it's a volunteer program. The benefit will be in having an opportunity to test your scripts and objects before the next server release to make sure that they will continue to work, and in helping to make Second Life a better place. Are we asking you to do the job of QA? No. We're not demanding a large time commitment or anything else. But we do know that there are people out there interested in checking out what's coming up and testing things, and we are extremely grateful for the help that you provide. In the end, that's the compensation you'll get: gratitude, participation in a group of residents and Lindens that want to work together to make and keep Second Life a great place, and participation in a group of residents who have "the ear" of some Lindens on at least this topic. (No, I fear you won't be able to use participation in the beta program and coming to the beta office hours as a way of trying to change policies that we have nothing to do with, but you will be able to influence which technical issues we pay attention to when testing and working on the next server release.)

Sadly, but without any drama, please remove my regions from the pilot and beta program as they will also be gone before the end of the year.

I will,as I have time,still frequent the beta grid and bug hunt, just with a bit less enthusiasm.

Prospero, I apologize. It was not my intention to bring drama. I am sure you will understand that emotions are running high right now.

Suffice to say that the region in question will no longer be available for participation in the beta project.

-Atashi

I've updated the Preview Grid wiki page with a list of the core regions that are on aditi. (This is not an exhaustive list, but these are regions that I expect will stay around long term.)

https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Preview_Grid

Does the fact that my file upload took L$10 out of my (admittedly pretend) L$5000 balance imply that we actually have only a limited number of free uploads?

Yeah, uploads cost there too. The aditi asset server isn't infinite, so we do need to limit an all-out filling of it....

If for some reason you need to upload more than 500 files while doing testing of stuff, then contact me. However, I have to admit that I'd be surprised if that were really necessary....

So I should stop uploading the embarrassing pics of Phillip and the other staffers at last year's LL Christmas party onto Aditi?


Just kidding Prospero... I haven't been able to make it to the meetings and probably wouldn't be of much help anyway since I'm not a region owner but eventually I'll be able to make one.

Calling all Beta Testers---

One of the problems we had with 1.25 was that llHttpRequest broke. My belief was that this couldn't have been tested by y'all on aditi because llHttpRequest was not enabled on aditi.

However, currently I'm thinking that llHttpRequest() is _supposed_ to be enabled everywhere on aditi. Are there regions where it is not? Is it working generally?

I'm redeploying server version 1.25 to aditi right now. SVC-3406 should be fixed in this deploy.

Would it be posible to split the deployment of 1.25 to first deploy the fixes that do not seem to be linked to the database problems and then add in the rest as bugs are found?

My own code is offcourse nowhere near as complex as the sim and central servers code but going back to the last stable state and add changes one at a time works for me and might work for your coding team too to help track down bugs that are hard to locate, at the very least it will be welcome by the residence to get at least part of the bugs fixed they are waiting for.

That's a simple question that has a very complicated answer.

Well, it has a simple answer, which is "no", but the reasons are complex.

There is always a tenssion between "small updates more often" and "big updates less often". Back when we used to announce RRs on the main blog, commenters were very frequently asking for big updates less often, because they hated having RRs so often. But, of course, bigger updates are more likely to lead to problems. At the moment, I personally think we're unbalanced more on the side of doing things not often enough, but there is always a debate for that.

Regarding 1.25 itself, though : knowing which are the bugs that are not likely to be causing the problems is not trivial. Separating them out and making, effectively, a whole new tree, would require a tremendous effort on QA to reverify basic behavior, and would set us even further back. The best way to get 1.25 out is to find the problem and revert just the code that caused it or, fix the code the caused it.

Incidentally, it was doing something along those lines that led us to find the "bloating central memory" bug that was fixed betwen 1.25.1 and 1.25.2. At a loss as to where it was coming from, we started reverting out different changes that had been made, and sticking the code on a single central host on the production grid to see if the bloat was still there. We didn't do it one-by-one, because that would have taken forever, but did it in chunks, doing a "binary search" sort of thing. (Eventually, a dev had inspiration as to where it might be, and reverting out that bit proved that in fact he was right.)

Has a correlation been noted between database server performance problems and rolling restarts? I certainly have observed that casually, and I would imagine that restarting massive numbers of regions has to put a strain on things.

Yesterday's outage had nothing to do with the rolling restart. There was an outage with L3.

So is the counter at the LL offices for L3 outages at 500 or 600 by now?

<sigh> I really wish L3 would get their act together