As I recently noted, Baker Linden has been working on the large group management / editing issues, developing a new HTTP-based service to replace the current UDP service which has significant issues handling groups with more than 10-11K members. At the TPV/Developer meeting on the 24th August, he indicated that a project viewer would be available in the near future.

On Friday September 7th, he updated the JIRA on the issue with notes that the project viewer is now available for Windows, Linux and OSX.

In commenting on the JIRA (SVC-4968), Baker notes that the server-side code for the new service has yet to be deployed to Aditi, where initial testing will take place, and adds that he’ll be providing an update on the status of the server code once the situation has been clarified. He goes on to add:

There may be some issues during testing. When getting the member list of a large group, other info (group title, group info, etc.) may not properly load. This is an issue with the speed of Aditi’s SQL server and shouldn’t occur once live on Agni. To receive the rest of the data, wait for the member list to appear (this can be upwards of a few minutes), go back to the My Groups panel of the people floater and view the group profile again. The query will be cached this time, and the member list will appear quicker than it did before (depending on your connection speed). The rest of the information should be received this time.

If you find any problems while testing, please send me a message in-world (on Agni).

As noted in my previous report, in the first implementation, the data will be uncompressed. This means there will still be some delays in group loading (Baker previously estimated that a 40K member group is around 5Mb in size and could take up to a few minutes to download, depending on someone’s connection speed). Data compression is being looked at for a future release, although as noted in the comments on my last article, some are wondering why paging group data isn’t being implemented (does the viewer API support it?).

Another point of note is that the new service is not compatible with V1 code, so adoption by V1-based viewers is liable to require some backporting. This is important, as once the new HTTP service is rolled out, the older, more limited UDP service will be capped at groups containing 10,000 members – larger groups will not function.

There is still no definitive time scale for the roll-out of the new service. However, it seems likely that once available on Aditi, the server code will remain there for testing for at least a couple of weeks prior to it being added to a RC channel on the main grid. How long the testing period across both will be is open to question, and a lot will depend on feedback as to how well the new service performs.