Server Deployments: week 12 – recap



Short and to the point: there weren’t any.

Upcoming Release Items

There are a couple of things server-side making their way towards a release:

Fix for login issues of agents with number display names – this is a fix an issue where users with display names made-up of numbers are unable to log-in. “It was a subtle change in a low-level library that started treating those as numbers and not strings,” Simon Linden said of the issue’s origins.

Fix for llTakeControls() issues with multiple scripts with mixed parameters in same prim

These fixes are liable to testing on Aditi prior to moving to an RC.

SL Viewer

On Wednesday March 18th, the Hotfix viewer was updated to version 3.7.4.288138. This now lists three core issues as being addressed:

Crash fix (MAINT-3703)

Update FmodEx library to 4.44.31

Additional work for MAINT-2718 (Linux viewer was using logging version of library)

Group Chat

As indicated in part 1 of this week’s report, there is work underway to try to improve group chat. A small-scale test with a dozen people was carried out with some of the initial improvements during the Sever Beta meeting on Thursday March 20th. “This is really a test that shows it doesn’t fall over with minor load,” Simon Linden said of it.

During the test, those present were asked to send lots of short messages at speed to two test groups while moving around and between various regions (walking, flying, teleporting). Few issues appeared to be noted, at least none that Simon indicted he was interested in (e.g. messages showing delay between being sent and appearing), but as noted, it was a small group. In terms of what has been done with the code and plans for the future, Simon went on:

Basically I dug into the code and found some inefficient parts and cleaned them up. I also added more metrics, so I’m hoping it can show an improvement. I’m pretty sure it will be better, but it’s really hard to guess how much better. I’m hoping to test it on the main grid soon. It would get put on a server and then it would affect a fraction of the groups. I can pick one group to target and make sure it covers that group.

As chat is handled back dedicated back-end servers, no simulator or viewer change will be required to take advantage of this work as it progresses. If the logs from this initial test show nothing unpleasant or unexpected, and providing LL’s QA are happy, testing on the main grid could start in a week’s time.