The Life 2.0 Summit, produced by CMP Technology/Dr. Dobb's Journal, is a quarterly conference on metaverse technology and best-practice for software developers and business stakeholders seeking to understand and use Second Life and other metaverse environments for customer engagement, commerce, collaboration, education, simulation and research.
The summit is on now and running until Friday. Today is update day, so there's only one event on the calendar.
6:00 - 9:00 PM SLT - The Rolling Restart Ball II
Join sponsors, speakers and fellow attendees -- along with a cadre of vampires, some dragons, ogres, and elves -- for 2007's second Rolling Restart Ball in the Cathedral. Costumes? Absolutely. DJ TBA
The ball will take place in the Cathedral on Dr Dobbs Island.
The Second Life grid is down for for approximately two hours while Linden Lab performs assorted hardware and database maintenance. It's all fairly routine, we are assured.
Later in the day, a number of updates are planned to roll out on the main grid via a rolling restart, but due to some QA issues, it's not clear at this stage what the final set of updates will consist of. We expect to hear more about that as the day progresses.
Here's wishing all of our readers an enjoyable two hour interstice and a minimum of hassles.
There's a rolling restart starting now (9:30AM SLT - aka US Pacific), which apparently is supposed to smooth up the communication between Second Life simulators and the third-party voice system, we gather. Linden Lab says "During the rolling restart and for a few hours afterwards, residents making use of the voice client may experience intermittent problems with voice. These should all be resolved by 3:00 PM." This would seem to be indicative of a protocol change between Linden Lab and the third-party voice provider.
That's probably long enough to annoy people with voice, but if it does improve the voice experience for them, then it's probably all worth it. Rolling restarts run north to south, so if you get the five minute warning in your sim, teleport somewhere North - although the map is behaving a little erratically today.
After Ruud Lathrop, Thomas Conover, Seronis Zagato and others tried to bring attention to the grid performance problems on Monday (Zagato, notably was reportedly threatened with a banning by a Linden Lab liaison for her efforts to inform affected residents), Linden Lab have found the issue and are today progressively restarting the grid with updated software that they believe will fix the issue.
The restart should be complete around 1-2 PM SLT (US Pacific). This restart is running North to South, so if you get a warning that the simulator you are in is about to shut down, you can teleport several sims northwards to escape the restart wave.
[Update: 1pm SLT - The rolling restart is now complete]
Second Life residents Ruud Lathrop, Thomas Conover and Seronis Zagato, to name just a few, have noted a significant performance decrease in simulators grid-wide. Performance of all scripts appears to have dropped a full 50% across the board, since the rolling restart on Thursday. This appears to be impacting residents in subtle ways, including causing problems with network vendors and security systems, and problems with the scripted orientation systems on Linden Lab's orientation islands.
When Seronis Zagato attempted to alert other Second Life Volunteers to the nature of the problem (as it had a noticeable impact on new resident experiences) she was, she says, dressed-down by a Linden Lab liaison. Ruud Lathrop has created a JIRA issue to alert Linden Lab to the problem, and to accumulate votes for it to be fixed. The issue is SCV-385.
Since the last rolling update, there have been a trickle of complaints about objects vanishing. Specifically, if you didn't have copy permissions on the object, and the object could not be created inworld, it was gone from your inventory.
The fix for this is apparently a minor one, and despite it being a Friday, Linden Lab is rolling out a fix for this in one hour's time, at 10pm SLT (US Pacific). Judging by the last one, it should take 2.5 hours to apply across the grid. With a little luck, nothing else will go horribly wrong in the process.
Linden Lab have just run a rolling restart fixing a number of bugs and glitches. The restart commenced at 10:55am SLT (US Pacific) and ran to 1:30pm. This bundle fixes quite a few general irritants that have been affecting users in the last little while. Here's the list of changes/fixes that were provided:
Yesterday's planned rolling restart which was rescheduled for today has now been called off completely. You'll need to wait until tomorrow for the fix for the crash that you get when trying to edit objects.
Apparently everyone's scurrying around chasing the login issues and related problems, and there's not enough time to spare for the deployment, restart and subsequent babysitting required for the planned update today. Here's hoping that all that extra scrutiny prevents yet more problems from coming out of the woodwork today, and leads to a smoother post-update period tomorrow.
Well, okay, not quite so bad as all that - but there is a reason we get updates on a Wednesday rather than on a Friday - it leaves a couple days to fix things if they go sour. Stuff that gets broken on a Friday even generally stays that way until .. well, usually Tuesday.
The broken function is llGiveInventoryList() which gives someone a bunch of objects in a named inventory folder. Most objects that give you multiple items use this function. The breakage occurs in that (since the rolling update today) the function does not now give you the items in a folder. Scripts go into your scripts folder, notecards to your notecards folder, animations to your animations folder, clothing and body parts to their respective folders, and (worse!) are automatically worn!
This alone promises a poor weekend for Residents who spend their time helping newbies.
Second Life is open for business again, but apparently the group Instant Message fixes will not take for each region until it has been individually restarted. A rolling restart takes a while, and is something of a nuisance. There is no ETA available for how long the rolling restart will take. Depending on how hard it is pushed, we can probably expect an hour at minimum.
Here's hoping that this actually fixes the problem. Just be ready to jump to another, distant sim if the one you are in starts giving you impending restart warnings.
Chadrick Linden shouts out that a rolling restart of all regions is about to commence in order to "fix some issues with our backend". What the issues are, exactly, aren't specified, nor is what changes have been made. When I've got issues with my own backend, I find a large warm glass of salty water does the trick. The restart should commence on or about 8PM SLT.
No information is given as to whether this restart will proceed in the north-to-south/east-to-west fashion in rows, as they usually do, or in the alphabetical order which was used in the last rolling restart. You get a few minutes warning, but you have to stay on the ball, and figure out relatively quickly where you have to jump to.
59 mainland regions and a number of private islands have been determined to be running the previous version of the Second Life server code instead of the current version. A rolling restart of mainland regions will take place at 11pm SLT tonight to get these simulators up to the current simulator version.
Private island owners who are affected may restart their simulators at any time to make sure they are current. The mainland sims are going to be restarted in alphabetical order for a change, rather than north-to-south/east-to-west, so watch out.
Most of you probably noticed that sims have been very crashy the last few days. Far more so than is usual. Pathfinder reports that a rolling restart will take place from about 8pm SLT, and finishing between 10 and 11pm.
Having had about 30 regions crash out from under me in the last 24 hours, I'm rather looking forward to something that improves that stability. Peak concurrency for the day and we're halfway through the long slide towards minimum concurrency for the day. I've got my fingers crossed that this will make a positive difference. [Update: The rolling update has been in progress for about ten minutes, and there are strong suspicions that this is actually a rollback to the state prior to yesterday's rolling restart. Warppos is no longer working in the sims that have restarted.] [Additional: Apparently Warppos has stopped working only in some sims, not all of them. Nonetheless Linden Lab confirms that this is a rollback of the last update.]
Well, even though this last update was a major rework, there seem to be a few too many annoying mid-level issues with it. Random prim drift (particularly evil); WarpPos broken (WarpPos relies on advertised features of llSetPrimitiveParams() that went away this update); Scripts not starting; The slew of asset and inventory problems since Wednesday; Some bonus sim crashiness; Attachment issues on tp's or border crossings (how much fun is it to teleport, wondering if you're going to re-rez at the far end with your heels and emblematic rose sticking out of your ass, hmm? - Definitely led to some very embarrassing arrivals at meetings, recently).
There's a rolling restart 'shortly' to fix some of these issues, as well as to apparently address other, unspecified problems. Rolling restarts move from the top of the map to the bottom, so if you get the warning that the sim you are in will be restarting soon, teleport a few rows of sims to the north to get behind the 'wavefront' of restarting sims.
Does this sound familiar at all? "Residents may be experiencing failed teleports, ability to change appearence[sic], viewing profiles, and searching for land sales."
Yes, more database problems as user concurrency ranged from 21,000 to 23,000+. The databases are certainly straining on query-duration, quantity and throughput. Without some serious redesign (hot-caching database front-ends or something of that order) to the pipeline, it's difficult to see past these problems in the near term as -- despite the issues -- Second Life just keeps growing.
There's a rolling restart starting now (9:30AM SLT - aka US Pacific), which apparently is supposed to smooth up the communication between Second Life simulators and the third-party voice system, we gather. Linden Lab says "During the rolling restart and for a few hours afterwards, residents making use of the voice client may experience intermittent problems with voice. These should all be resolved by 3:00 PM." This would seem to be indicative of a protocol change between Linden Lab and the third-party voice provider.
Second Life residents Ruud Lathrop, Thomas Conover and Seronis Zagato, to name just a few, have noted a significant performance decrease in simulators grid-wide. Performance of all scripts appears to have dropped a full 50% across the board, since 
Since the last rolling update, there have been a trickle of 
Yesterday's planned rolling restart which was rescheduled for today has now been called off completely. You'll need to wait until tomorrow for the fix for the crash that you get when trying to edit objects.
Well, okay, not quite so bad as all that - but there is a reason we get updates on a Wednesday rather than on a Friday - it leaves a couple days to fix things if they go sour. Stuff that gets broken on a Friday even generally stays that way until .. well, usually Tuesday.
Second Life is open for business again, but apparently the group Instant Message fixes will not take for each region until it has been individually restarted. A rolling restart takes a while, and is something of a nuisance. There is no ETA available for how long the rolling restart will take. Depending on how hard it is pushed, we can probably expect an hour at minimum.
Chadrick Linden shouts out that a rolling restart of all regions is about to commence in order to "fix some issues with our backend". What the issues are, exactly, aren't specified, nor is what changes have been made. When I've got issues with my own backend, I find a large warm glass of salty water does the trick. The restart should commence on or about 8PM SLT.
59 mainland regions and a number of private islands have been determined to be running the previous version of the Second Life server code instead of the current version. A rolling restart of mainland regions will take place at 11pm SLT tonight to get these simulators up to the current simulator version.
Does this sound familiar at all? "Residents may be experiencing failed teleports, ability to change appearence[sic], viewing profiles, and searching for land sales."
