What causes asset server troubles?

Anyone know what causes the issues we've been having with the asset server(s)?

Too many assets?

Apparently the server is no longer powerful enough to handle SL, which is why they are replacing it with a more powerful machine. Growth sucks. Wait! No it doesn't!

we used to believe that bloated inventories caused us to lag considerably and most people, i think, made an effort to keep their inventories as small as possible.

it seems that nobody bothers to do that anymore. we all just create a new folder to dump old stuff into just in case we think that we might ever remember it at a time that we think we might need it although we'll likely not remember the five folder path or even be able to find it among all of our thousands of entries.

i typed that all in one breath. ha ha ha. anyway, i believe we could solve this problem if enough of us took a little time and stripped our inventory of trash, duplicates and things we don't really want or need. if we don't act responsibly, [pause for hysterical laughter] ll may be forced to place a quota on the number of items we can store.

Agreed Khamon... an organized inventory is a great way toward helping the problem. I wonder though if there might be a way to help unload some of those items that you rarely use, but don't want to give up.

For example, I have dozens of objects that I use once in a while, yet I do not want to give them up for various reasons.

This got me thinking, maybe we need an archive vault? LL could setup a separate 'archive' asset server with several IW access points where you could identify your av, drag/drop your folder of seldom-used goods. At any later point, you could walk up to this access point, click on it and have it drop you the folder again. This would allow people to toss what they really dont need/want, but still retain things they seldom use but don't want to give up... all w/o overloading the main asset server.

Hey, that's a good metaphor. Sure, a safety deposit box or treasure chest, or some sort of way to store all that "junk" you MAY need later -- but for the purposes of the here and now, you just want to go on with your Second Life.

There should be more ways to sort items. I mean, even Windows can sort by date... so how about sorting by "date unused" or "unviewed/unplayed" (in the case of textures and sounds) and other methods to help one clean out their inventory.

PAGING TAESSA WEAVER! he he he

I'm not sure about the time it takes to load at the beginning (getting your inv list) but I assume (and hopefully correctly) that is only sending a list of UUIDs and perhaps names/perms. If it is sending entire objects something is up and some code NEEDS to change. This means a 1000prim box or a 1 prim box in inventory.. that is going to stay in inventory is the same. However if you rez the 1000 prim box.. the sim you are in will need to ask the asset server for the information on all 1000 prims.. thus that will take longer than the 1 prim box to load. It also means once the game is running it shouldn't be hitting the asset server.

If the asset loader is having problems due to peoples inventory .. this means more people are both (a) in SL and (b) actively using objects in SL.. meaning it is time for a server upgrade, and when that fails some type of distributed database.

otherwise it is the sims asking for more objects (I'm sure sims going off line today virtually or otherwise doesn't help in this respect) for normal unattended run time.. Someone needs to look and see whats up (however this might be due to increased sims and therefor better hardware is the solution)

If I'm way off the mark a Linden should respond to this thread.. but I hope I'm not.

Everytime there is a problem things load slow. TP doesn't work right..and they ask us to remove attachments. I never have much problems with inventory at all.

Just Prims and Textures and Movement.

The asset server issues might be caused by that pepsi that someone "spilled" on the server. If all else fails, blame the soda.

PWNED!!!!!1111 yourself

/chuckles

this is what I post when i get bored. or as the newbies say, board

Legith, I'm not exactly a Linden but I can tell you that these days the inventory is stored on the client side. When you start up, it merely checks if you have it out of sync with the server copy. A couple of versions ago it was always streamed from the server, in the form of a large list of keys, of course, and you could sometimes go for half an hour in-game before the inventory finished loading, when it finished at all!

Boxing up the stuff you no longer need should have zero (or even a slightly positive) impact on the asset server, since object contents are streamed only when they are needed, and never while you have the object in your inv.

I find talking about LL's "assets" rude.

You know, I've always wondered if Robin looks anything like her avatar *grins* =)

The problem is a poor architecture. One only needs to look at the internet itself to see this. Root servers, yes, can be centralized .. but terabyte content asset servers? Ehhh...

Ever watch that star wars movie where a young darth vader takes out the entire enemy by taking out one satellite?

SecondLife has a single point of failure, which at first seems doable as you can just use oracle load balancing or some such nonsense, but after you gain some experience you realise that central points of failure are doable for things like DNS or load balancers or something, but that's about it.

After being in the biz for awhile, you start to realise that if you don't want to take out your entire customer base in a single mistake (someone accidently reboots the database) you need to 'shard' the world like SOE, UO, etc..

However, you do *not* need to shard the world such that you have paralell universes. They could simply shard the world such that assets are spread across servers.

They will eventually migrate to this architecture. Every single long term architecture does. They could just be at this current one because it was easy to ramp up to, and always intended in moving away from it. We'll see.

We are vigorously working on medium to long term scalability issues in Second Life. We will probably never 'shard' the world to address these problems. The central points of failure that still exist are being migrated to load balanced or distributed systems. The overall architecture of the system is quite robust and scalable, but some of the systems were centralized to speed development and deployment so we could bring you what you see today.

We are also working on some short term fixes for asset problems so carry the world more reliably to the point where we have a fully distributed asset system.

Garth and I went to Linden Lab last Wednesday, and Robin looks a lot like the picture on her profile,,,,, BUT much prettier!

Yep, in the mean time I found a picture of her on the web. My collection of linden pictures progresses!
Here's everyone's favorite forum dictator: http://www.nyls.edu/images/harper.jpg
Pretty isn't she?

Wow, she looks just like my mother about 40 years ago!!!

Robin! Where are you?
We've found your long-lost daughter, Lisse!
Shame on you for leaving her alone all these years!
Please send me an object made by you so I can neg-rate your behavior... and pos-rate your appearance

lol... you people sure love to float off topic eh? Quite amusing however...

Topics are only illusions!

And Robin is perty!

Well, I've talked about backup a lot. We've had some situations with asset server crashes and rollbacks where people actually lost stuff.

Also, there are a lot of things people don't want to get rid of...

As far as backup goes, instead of import/export, how about letting us keep "snapshot points" for restore, of our inventories, on our local systems?

They could be encrypted, and this could allow people to hoard a little less... perhaps restore could be 'replace' or 'merge'.

Yeah, I know, its more work that probably isn't a priority now. But it might cause people to slim down their inventories some, without having to wrestle with DRM involved in a client side per-object export.

Essentially you'd be saving, client side, "restore points". I believe that the client is pretty close to doing this as it is anyways, when it compares client to server side inventory caches.

Torley had a good idea, but it's already kind of implimented... I think...



We can make a prim and dump the contents we dont need immediately into said prim... like that outrageous snapshot folder you probably have.... Dump em into a box...

if this doesnt change the amount of space you occupy on the asset server then ummm....

it would be neat if we had an object contents .zip / .rar option so we can compress storage, merchants can sell contents that are zipped, and buying said contents unzips them into your inventory... etc etc... lots of possibilities... Or, I could just be tech inept?

Eh, easy solution...

format c: /q /u

or

mkfs -t ext2 /dev/sda1

Hehe, just kidding