Second Life Grid Update from FJ Linden

I vote for Frank to appear to be the most balanced, most enthusiastic, most honest and most productive Linden we see in the forums. Keep up the good work!

PS .. I don't want a bear to clog up the Assets

You're just panda-ring to the pro-hippo coalition.

The biggest reduction in texture downloads came when they patched that security hole in downloads a few revs back. It's gotten faster again since, though it seems to have been at the expense of latency for regular traffic (eg, commands... I sometimes get as much as 7s latency for several minutes after teleporting into a new location, even with my download speed throttled to 50k).

There are reasons for a business ownner to have alts that have aboslutely nothing to do with traffic and there are bots that have nothing to do with traffic. Many people need to utilize more than 25 groups for business purposes and the only way to do that is to have extra alts. Those that you refer to as premium or paying members are no more important to LL than anyone else. (Nor should they be) Everyone contributes in some way to the economy and community of SL and everyone is at a different point in their journey.

While the technology is moving along, and hopefully in the right direction, there are still some serious database and assett issues which have a negative impact upon residents. And some long standing bugs which have not been addressed.

In reply to some of the other comments posted here - There are definitely valid reasons for alt accounts for some people, although I believe that LL should redo the way they are given out (first alt account free if you are a premium member, otherwise go to what has 'supposed' to be in place all along and charge a fee for the alt account creation - this would certainly help cut down on all of those using these 'alt' accounts as traffic bots etc.)

And as for the bots, while there are some legitimate uses for some kinds of bots, there are unfortunately many who abuse them and do place a much higher than neccessary strain on the infrastructure. From the thousands upon thousands of camping bots who do nothing to 'contribute', yet lag out sims and the whole grid, to those landbots who run 24x7 with each one hammering the database 28,800 times a day, to the sim scanner bots (granted some of these have a legitimate purpose, but when there are untold numbers of these runnings the negative effects add up), the bot issue is one that LL has long said it will address, yet still nothing has really been done.

The search database definitely needs some work still as there are still many times when search results are inconsistent, the databases lag behind, the result sets can be different with each search etc.

That being said, invetory losses do seem to have stabalized a bit, and in the cases where there have been inventory loss, in my own experience, LL support has been quite helpful in helping to find lost assets. Considering that it was just a couple of years ago when 20k online users would bring the grid grinding to a halt, and now we have regular concurrency up in the 70k+ range, LL has done pretty good in some aspects of scaling, but there are definitely still quite a few areas that still need some improvement. Here's hoping to see some great strides in this over the next few months!

If you'd fix the viewers failing to cache textures, a great load of network traffic would be eliminated. Even the RCs aren't doing it right and things are borderline unusable. I'm glad to hear the private fiber is coming along, though. A little good news in an otherwise terrible last couple of months. I'm happy to hear it. Once some stability is established, a few of my friends who quit over the last couple of months may return to SL again.

I'm all for the B-Tree technology, FJ. And the distributed, persistent key-value stores sounds like a good idea.

But I would still advise some fail-over servers.

What are your thoughts on fail-over servers?

You say in one breath that you are not implying any form of discrimination, then imply that free accounts get 'gently logged out'. LOL.. I wont go into deep depths about how I became a 'Free Account', but let me say this, I employ around 40+ ppls in SL, and have a turnover of around 10,000,000L$ a year... whats free about that? How do you compare that to someone who pays a premuim to use SL Support and buy land direct from LL? At best, LL would gain around 120 USD a year per account, and how much does this service cost? Far more than the income for sure. You should never broad brush any situation, nor assume one parameter has a singular implication.

Going back to the OP, one issue that has been plaguing recently is the loss of the Aquired date to objects, this can result in even the creator of the object being denied access to edit them. I wonder if this is linked to the recent 'loss' of items from ppls inventories?

"Our central database has been a source of instability the past few weeks, and we have been spending considerable time investigating root cause issues. Given the complicated nature of the service, none of these issues have been easy to identify, but I'm expecting that we will have answers over the next few weeks"

Please don't tell me we are in for a month or two (or three) of daily fails. rly.

on a side note ... it would be nice if you guys actually invested in some up to date, decent sim hardware that could actually run your code without limping all over itself.

Where's all the money anyway?

also...#*()$& the bots. ok? You tell us you have load issues and you do nothing about bots and multi accounts. You deserve any mud that comes your way.

It would be neat if the sim network team actually fixed a few of the long standing bugs instead of just giving us price hike updates with invisible code that seems to break things on an epic scale.

famous linden last words.... (2005, 2006, 2007,200 2009 will be all about stability!

You seem a little more on the ball then lindens of xmas past, but we've heard this song before, many times, in many keys. I think it was 06 or 07 when Phil sent out emails to all sim owners begging us to not leave telling us that he would force his crew to focus on stability. Ah, good times.

Potential doesn't put food on the table. Results. Let's have some. Or will 2010 be "all about stability" still?

kthxbai

As most of you know, I'm the last person to defend LL when they make an obvious business blunder, and I sense your frustration, however blasting like this, will do one thing, get the thread closed.
One of the reasons I'm still investing in SL, is because of the changes last year. The arrival of M Linden has seen some long needed progress, albiet he is fighting some very old fires, it has been progress in the right direction. What has been happening of late, is the painful progress to correct some of the historic failures of investment in many of the systems, that are now showing clearly why they should have been addressed long ago.

I'll give M Linden another 6 months to get this ship in order.

Very good post FJ.

Certainly SL still has issues to be addressed that can be quiet frustrative after seeing the same things happen over and over again since over more than 2 years ago in my case.
However i do experience that small steps forward can be noticed and a bit better reliability.

Off topic maybe, however i do hope you get VWR-8503 fixed very soon (the slower rendering since SL 1.21). See Jira for all details and many, many, many reporters and voters.
If all not very intelligent thingies that sometimes happen at LL this one is a very critical one, if not a show stopper. I'm most glad that M Linden and LL have recognized it.
Most reporters have classified it as a show stopper in VWR-8824, however LL lately has closed 8824 in favor of 8503 which is the same report with many more voters, however rated as critical now.

What i really would do is to forget 1.21 and 1.22RC / 1.22PN and force users back to 1.20 as a first crisis. This issue is now going on since Oct 2008 and stalls the economy.
Parallel i would develop 1.21B and put it out when the issue is solved.

Meanwhile of course keep the work on as you have reported latetly.
I do hope you get a fix soon now. Meanwhile i hold my business in sl.

Captain! The Isilon storrage clusterrrs canna take much more o' this!

(I love it when Frank speaks Techno, even when I don't understand one word in six).

Keep those clusters on line, Mr. Scott!!

Hopefully he has a better relationship with the Captain than Doohan. Doohan actually hated Shatner and thought he was talentless and a pompous ass.

Re: free accounts, please add me to the chorus of those who feel they should be restricted during high load times. I am only referring to "No Payment Info On File" however, not Payment Info Used. If someone is buying L$ they are NOT a free account IMO and deserve the same access as Premium members.

I have a single working, useful bot but I agree that bot farms should be limited. My suggestion would be to limit the number of simultaneous connections allowed per IP, either always or during high load times. Further, during high load times you could log off all connections from those IPs, and then only allow the first 3 or so to reconnect. This would allow for multiple users from the same household, and useful bots, but reduce concurrency caused by traffic/camping bots.

I think bots should be destroyed!!!.....why oh why do people need bots???.
I am a land owner and every night i come on there is a souless bot standing there across the way dancing on a stupid pole....just seemingly saying...hahahaha i am the reason you get kicked!!!.
Its stupid!!!...for what purpose???....the place she is dancing in is always empty!!!
I think that if an av is in active for anywhere near an hour THEY should be kicked not me!!!
But there she dances.....smiling away....just saying....hahahahahaha.....bugger!!

Oh I dont have a problem with those bots which model clothes......although.....i think the as was said b4 should be restricted.
Lets have a spring clean.....get rid of all the unused accounts and dump all those bots....start a liscence programme!!!!

/me throws a sheep at Maggie!

Quiet you!

Well that screws up a large proportion of education and business connections in one foul swoop, yet again another 'one parameter solution'.

Thinking about it, I'm not sure bots are the source of nearly as many problems as people claim.

Now, I'm not a fan of camp-bots, who sit on camping spots to earn money for someone - filling up space for legitimate people to camp and chat.

However, traffic bots, where you have someone running a batch of bots just sitting somewhere somewhat hidden, aren't that big a deal:

1) They're generally dressed in newbie clothes - baked on textures, rather than all kinds of prim clothes, so little lag generated there - and when they're out of sight, virtually *no* lag.

2) They're generally in the basic animation state of standing or sitting - only occasionally dancing, but even that is just one animation to be downloaded to the client for playing locally.

3) They're not swapping clothes on and off, moving around, buying/selling things, or otherwise triggering events for scripts (except for avatar radars, perhaps).

4) They probably have a minimal inventory - not much more than the Linden Library inventory

Now, they *do* place some load on the chat communications infrastructure - any groups they're in, they get hit with group chat, and they get any whispers, chat, or shouts that they're in range of, but they tend not to send out that stuff.

That being said, they *do* inflate the concurrency numbers, and the traffic ratings, and so in general I'm not particularly fond of them, but they don't do nearly the harm many people seem to think. One person, wearing a normal load of prim attachments, who teleports probably puts as much load on the database servers in that one teleport as those traffic bots do the whole time they're logged in (as prim attachments are de-rezzed and re-rezzed completely anew during a teleport).

(A bit tongue-in-cheek here, but...) One thing you can do to reduce the load on the LindenNet between the servers is to stay within the center 64m x 64m of a SIM, so the bordering SIMs don't have to get updated on your avatar...

I'm pleased to hear about the improvements LLnet will bring. As Shockwave Yareach mentioned, I think fixing the LL viewer and it's chache system would also have a great effect on grid performance. Here are some further ideas :

* Allow the user to set favorite places and people that remain in the cache

* Give the user controls to filter out unwanted traffic, to the point of focusing on downloading only a single item of interest. A 64m minimum draw (download) distance is too high in many situations. Filter presets could be included. For example, sleepers and campers could reduce their wasted bandwidth with an easy one-button text only "sleep mode". Intuitive user adjustable filtering helps lessen our own lag as well as strain on servers.

* Allow users to prioritize downloads. For instance, a "shopping" template that gives full download priority to the sim, and only downloads surrounding avatars once the rest is complete. As well, the ability to give CHAT top download priority would be welcome. Currently, many people have lag of over a full minute sending a line of text to a chat group.

* It's not too late to improve the default texture library. Adding top quality textures for all designers to use and storing these textures on the users local machine could reduce network loads and increase rendering speeds.

here's hoping
Brai Magic

Oii oii
Reading this makes me sad.
I really hoped we left these periods of money behind us.
Of course some residents are paying a monthly fee to linden lab, and I do understand it is annoying if you cant receive the service you're paying for. But to logout free accounts or alts goes beyond a limit. You cant just logout a free account just because a paying resident wants to loging and enjoy his home. I really dont want to see the ''money talks'' policy at Linden Labs.. would be very very wrong.

I would rather see linden lab finding a better way to solve this important issue.
Disabling logins cant be the perfect solution, can it?
Hopefully one day, the main server is able to handle all the logins at the same time.

Well..... I have a simple and very basic Question:

Why does it always feels like we do a great step backwards
when the Grid is updated ????

Makes me remember the time when I droped into
SL 2 Years ago !

Funny...I remember Upgrade Wednesdays too. The entire grid HAD to be brought down and restarted. No one was logged in; but for LL employees, except on the beta server for hours at a time.

Now, for a real question... will I still be getting the dreaded "asset not found in database" message if, in fact, it's stuck in bulk storage? I fear this may be the case.

First, to the OP - thanks very much for the update - most of it is all Geek to me, but it sounds positive - nice to know some good efforts are being put in place to continue to improve the SL experience.

As for those cries of who should be excluded when LL want to limit logins, I would hazard a guess that it's "anyone with a status less than mine so that I can still get in" is ruling here. Sorry to be so cynical.

If you think that the "no payment info on file" is going to be a good judge, once word gets out, everyone (especially bots) will be doing a $1 transaction just to get that status changed. It's not an effective solution in my opinion.

Limiting it to just Premium might be an incentive for more to become premium, but that would only work if it was for VERY short periods of time.

Trying to detect who is a "bot" isn't an option, either, I feel - nobody has found a way of telling if a resident is truly a bot or not.

I feel that the only way to effectively get rid of bots is to make them useless to run. What's the word: "deincentivize" it *yuck* If traffic wasn't an issue anywhere in SL any more, then most of the camping chairs would go, and why would people then have bots?

Sorry but Bots dont cause much lag or trouble.
They can be ignored easily.

Anyway..
What I experienced, is that If I dont move for 30 minutes, SL logs me off for inactivity.
This SHOULD log off the bots too then?

I would suggest Linden Labs finds a way to improve the servers, so they can handle the 80K traffic. Like they say ''we have to develop''... why not invest some money in developing your own servers?