Inter-sim communication anomalies

This is just a heads-up to everyone. I saw in the release notes that inter-sim communication has been overhauled and decided to do what little testing I can in preview to see if the changes will break SL Exchange.

I haven't found anything that is a show-stopper per se, but I have found one anomaly that concerns me (I already reported it). I intentionally logged off and made it so my IMs were capped. I then logged in and had an object in another sim repeatedly try to deliver objects to me. Delivery repeatedly failed after logging in until I moved to a different sim.

I am pretty sure that IMs, inventory transfers, notifications, and possibly some other inter-sim communications all use the same data channels, so there are possibly some wide-ranging implications. Keep an eye out for weird happenings in this area!

How big a difference has this feature made do you think? It seems like the most important update to 1.9 really, but it looks like a performance improvement, especially in terms of scalability. I'm hoping it will be one of the lag reducers we've been looking for =)

I'm not sure its scalability is something that can be tested thoroughly until it is in effect on the main grid, but if I understand correctly it sounds like they have changed to a more IRC-like style of linking sims together. If that is the case, then I think it will be a good incremental step toward a more decentralized grid.

I'd still suggest being extra careful with money and inventory until a couple patches after 1.9 though.

I've been testing this alot as with the other features, I have noticed this issue with transfers but not been able to fully reproduce it accurately, a bug in the same area is if you send an object offline via another object it looses part of the data in the dropdown ie instead of showing the object type it will display (null)

And with the above bug i've noticed that nothing is actually lost, its more like that the system thinks your offline, and crossing a border or relogging will send the objects to you, i've had this occur when sending agent>agent in two different sims, but so far not reproducable

Most of the inter-sim communicatoin changes are for scalability, and should not have any visible side effects. However, one of them is that 'agent presence' is cached. If an object sends an IM to you while offline, you log in, and it continues sending IMs, some of those messages will be persisted rather than forwarded to your in-world location. We would like to simultaneously tell every machine in the grid that you are online, but that is a difficult scaling problem -- one we will not be solving with this release.