Rolling Restart for 1.24.6, 2008 Sep. 15-17

I absolutely agree Prospero, which is why I said "for the most part". The work done during actual testing to report and clear up specific current bugs is exactly what its good for, for those that can navigate it.

By "wasteland for the most part" I meant that there are bugs there that have been reported, assigned, unassigned and remain unresolved going back to the beginning of time. The number of unresolved bugs grows larger with every release, and the idea that people would investigate anything that isnt directly related to current changes is pretty much a fantasy. In the odd case a fantasy comes true, of course, but not "for the most part"

Prospero.. While we're waiting for the rolling restart.. and since the Jira has been mentioned, I have a question about the Jira.

There are hundreds, if not thousands of Jira threads. It seems that most of these threads never "see the light of day" in terms of Linden notice. Some threads sit and languish for months, with hundreds of votes, and yet no Linden ever seems to take the slightest notice in them.

What is supposedly the correct procedure here? we've seen things with 2 votes get added to the client, (disabling blinking IM tabs for example) and hundreds of votes to do something else (ironically.. reinstating blinking tabs is an example) go almost ignored.

Are we supposed to report our favourite Jira threads to the appropriate Lindens? Is there a list someplace of which Linden does what? or should we just try them all? Are we expected to stalk them down at their "office hours" and then ambush them with questions about the Jira threads they've failed to notice?

How do we appropriately bring threads that are important to us, to Linden attention?

Sounds like the very definition of "wasteland" to me.



Not to say Prospero might not have a better suggestion but really the only methods provided are the ones you've mentioned - with the exception of prayer

You vote, maybe follow up at office hours if its really important to you, and you hope or pray that some not-so-busy linden goes looking for something to do in the backlog.

Subscribe to the sldev list if you want to follow along with the open-source team and see whats being discussed about client-side changes. You will find the programmers participating are fairly frustrated as well though, people spend days and weeks tracking down issues and submitting patches that are equally ignored.

I'd say if you are a programmer and join that list actively then perhaps you stand a better chance then the next guy of getting your suggestions heard, a few of the old time die-hards there are actually given a fair amount of respect. For the most part tho the participation isnt really so much an open-source collaboration as it is a more active discussion thread that has the ear of the client coding team, then they tend to go off and decide for themselves what to impliment and how - Theres a good bit of informative back and forth tho - and to be fair, they do seem to absorb alot of input before they make a decision.

Will SVC-2675 be addressed in this upcoming version?

Thanks,

Ren

I doubt it, since the issue is still open, and hasn't even been assigned yet.

Here's the list of updates in Server 1.24: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Release_Notes/Second_Life_Beta_Server/1.24

No. The bytecode was created in the viewer IF you had mod rights and so could recompile the script. Neither bytecode nor source gets sent to the viewer with Mono.

Has it started yet?

No -- we're a bit hung up at the moment, but hope to get the pilot deploy out soon.

Prospero -

I would like to comment that the way updates are done now are by far much better than back when we had the dreaded "Update Wednesdays" and all that encompassed those days!

Maybe some people were not around then, but I remember sometimes not being able to get on all day, and when the grid opened, you had to download a newer viewer, then there was the mad rush of everyone trying to log on at the same time and the hard time the asset db servers had handling that, and so on.

Server updates are so much better now and I expect forthcoming improvements to the current methods will make them even better in the future.

Keep up the good work and dedication!

PS - Where's Jack?

OK, we have to delay the deploy a day, so expect the pilot roll *Tuesday* night.

I have been crashing allot in the past few weeks. Will VWR-2997 be fixed in this rolling restart?

VWR-2997 (and most any JIRA beginning with VWR) is a viewer bug, Lori. Viewer bugs (usually) aren't fixed with rolling restarts.

Any chance you could tell us why the rollouts are being delayed? this is the 3rd time its been delayed without any reason being given I think, just wondering if the problem that is delaying the rollout could also have been affecting the grid last week.

No, the problem delaying the rollout isn't anything affecting the grid. The problems have just been as we're doing the final finishing touches of QA, we find some problems that lead us to realize that we need to do further fixes before we do the pilot roll.

Is nice to know that QA is doing a great job catching problems before they arise in the production grid.

agreed, and thanks for the update, now i can look elsewhere for the cause of the problem - like... trillion dollar bailout news maybe?

I just had one of my sims restarted as part of the rolling restart and it returned stuff as having gone off world (phlegon)

I remember them well. They really sucked! :/

Pilot is done, now the first half, odds or evens sims to roll? Keep the good work!

Has it started yet? Are ya going to give us a % of done?

Update 2008-09-24 05:30am: The first-half rolling restart is beginning now. Even-numbered hosts will be updated to 1.24.6.97433.

It *just* started. (I said 5:30 on the blog post, but there was a delay making sure that everybody was ready to go, and then it took about 15 minutes to bittorrent the code out to all our servers.)

I will post a % update every hour here.

At 6:30am, the first-half rolling restart is 15% complete. (It started at 6am.)

/me grabs the popcorn and settles in.......

At 7:36am, the rolling restart is 58% complete.

Note that I expect the rate at which hosts restart to slow down a bit in the last 30-40%.