No LL, its NOT our Content

Gather around the camp fire kiddies, its time for a little story to start up some controversy.

I help manage the sim in Dreamland called The Forest. In the Forest for the past year we have been suffering sim criplling lag spikes that would send the Time Dilation to 0.01 for anywhere from 10 seconds to 10 minutes or more at least 1 - 3x an hour and we would also crash at least 3 - 6x a day regardless of the amount of agents in the sim. Before I joined the officers in charge of The Forest, the previous admins gave up the hunt for the cause of the problems after a good 6 months of hunting.

Then 2 months ago there was a change in administration and I was chosen to be an officer. I dedicated a good month of my time picking up where the old officers left off and came to the following conclusion: either the 12 networked vendors in the store are laggy as hell, our hardware is insufficient, or both. My research has shown we were on a Class2 server, yes a private sim (the first mature furry sim too) on a crusty old Class2 barely chugging along. I noticed with each crash we were relocated to another available Class2 while the old machine restarted. Each Class2 had the same results: large quanities of random sim crippling lag spikes & sim crashes that gave us close to 12 hours down time a week.

So to figure out what exactly is the cause of our problems I decided it was a simple matter of the process of elimination. So I spent some time getting ahold of the sim's owner (Anshe Chung) and worked with her to gain Estate Tool access & to contact LL to relocate us to a newer machine. Anshe called LL and arranged the move while I used the new tools to examine the current setup more closely. From what I could tell with the help of the Estate Tools, it was NOT our content. Nothing but a vehicle (wich was recently removed) had a script time higher then 0.2ms.

As of March 30th 2006, we've been relocated to a Class3 machine. Since the relocation we have yet to crash or recieve those sim crippling lag spikes. Other then the bug in 1.9.0 where Image Time and Network Time would spike when new visitors come to or pass by the sim we've suffered nothing we recieved in the past.

Conclusion: It WASN'T our content, it WAS LL's servers. Sorry LL, that excuse is no longer valid by far. Time to retire those old Class2's like you did the Class1's and finish moving sims to the newer more capable Class3's & 4's.

If you own a private sim and you've spent weeks or even months like we did in search of serious stability problems check the class of the server you're on. If you're on a 2, chances are your sim is incapable of keeping up with your modern scripted objects.

you need to fire one up with wayfinder!

LOL, oh god, I remember that battle!

With $11 million recently coming in, hopefully they will upgrade everything to Class 4.

*Slaps his forehead*

i think we met in that thread nimrod

even the dead guy makes an appearence

The dead guy? O_o

Difference between that topic and this one is not lag caused by sharing a server, but the inefficiencies of the old servers and the effect it has on a sim.

was just giving you a preview of what you are going to have to go thru before they acknowledge a problem. they will tell you to check everything accept the conceiege guy lying to your face (or avatar)

How do you find out what class of server you are on?

coco

Oh I know, I'm actually expecting it. We spent alot longer then Wishbringer plowing through it all already. I've even used the tools that some poeple claim are sufficient enough to do the job even though they're still lacking. I did the process of elimination, did the dance with the Laisons, and possilby even awakened the slumbering ancient gods of darkness in the process. They even acknowlaged the amount of downtime we've suffered when I was trying to work with them to find the problem. In the end I have my proof & witnesses and they have the data in their logs.

I think someone had something that you typed in your server name, and it said what other sims were on the same server. Anyone have a link?

http://secondlife.com/tiki/tiki-index.php?page=SimClasses

When in your sim goto About Second Life in the Help menu.

You should see something like this:

Namely you wanna look at sim759.agni.lindenlab.com where sim759 is the server number.

Class 2 sims are absolute shite. I have one only, and you couldn't give me another.

In a couple of years time, we will be moaning that the class 4 sims don't do the job. It's an unfortunate consequence of better hardware being introduced, everyone wants it. A balance needs to be struck between us as residents realising that, and LL having a policy of retiring older hardware after x time.

Did you ever pay that guy who got screwed by the slot machine?

Yes, that issue was resolved a long time ago.

Ya know I'm a little surprised no Lindens, not even Torely, responded to this thread yet.

I'm not amig0 - it hasn't been business hours at LL and Torley needs to recharge her batteries sometimes too.

Have you tried shutting off scripts completely on all parcels in the sim? That would help narrow the search to "script based problem" versus "sim based problem".

Regards,

-Flip

I've done everything Flipper. And if you read my first post a little more carefully you'd noticed that all our problems dissapeared after the move from a Class2 to a newer Class3. All our problems were caused by the inefficient Class2 servers incapable of handling modern content for what ever the reason (probly just LL optimizing their code for the Class3 & 4 machines causing problems on the older Class2's they've been claiming to phase out for months now).

I would think it would be their first priority. Keep the customers up to date, and happy.

The reason I ask is because I know certain scripts have caused problems on Class2's that aren't noticable on Class3's (my hunch is that the script scheduler introduced in 1.7 was tuned for the newer servers, since the lion's share of machines are newer; this could cause "deep think" problems on older servers). Hopefully they'll get back to ya soon.

Regards,

-Flip

BTW ron i returned all those vehicles on the skyway. Proposal wasnt over but i know it will pass. >.> The sim is still algging like heck though. While i was on the swingset earlier with friends, i noticed a time dilation that delayed chat. So we might still need to focus on our end of the lag problem. Also how do we know that LL wont just stick us back on a class 2 server next time the sim crashes?

Because I reset the server once and we didn't move to another class2. And I was there when we had that lag spike, it was some guy messing with a bunch of physics enabled balls dropping them around by the store. And if you remember what I told you Yiffy, we're suffering the same issues as every other sim with the Image/Net time bug. The point is, our sim is no longer being crippled by unknown causes.