Fri, 15/10/2010 - 18:13
It is back to basics for LL. FJ Linden obviously remembered what they have announced some time ago and so we see a new development. And one that does include some of the things people have been asking for for a long time now. Sometimes this asking was more like misguided screaming, but often then not it was all about very valid concerns and problems we have all encountered in our daily SL existence:
It starts big with a short description of the team working on it and the usual assurance that all will be done and everyone is working as much as they can. One can believe it or not, but I do give everyone the benefit of doubt. Even when, like in the case of LL, they have proven again and again that they are extremely jumpy and incoherent with their decisions. On the other hand, this was mostly true for the management with the tech people doing their work reasonably well and only missing on the bug fixes. Now I will wait and see if that what they have announced will become reality. I will be happy if this will be the fact abut also not surprised if not. I will simply wait and see if the lag reduction will work as envisioned. The point outlined in the post, that avatars cause lag spikes when arriving in a sim, is of course valid but I hope that once this is rolled out into the grid it is better tested then the last servers. It would be comical otherwise when a lag reduction is introduced with masses of failing servers like it happened in the last week. This wasn't nice at all … not at all .. /me shudders
But anyway. The server nightmare is hopefully over once everything is working correctly and we can move on to textures. Now this is nothing new since the introduction of HTTP textures has been done a while ago and even further ago this setting has been spotted in the debug settings of various viewers. Now I can't really say much about technical side of things but it has been already stated, that LL wants to change the texture rendering. Now it is just the case of waiting for all viewers to be able to use it, what will be automatically once everyone moves to the v.2 codebase. Who has not done it so far is working on it and while I didn't had problems here while using Phoenix, I remember very well how it is to wait for textures to load. I am not really sure if this will truly make it a thing of the past, but at least it shows the potential of a change for the better. The same goes for the next announcement that the same what goes for textures will be true for the asset servers. I guess those are the most hated and most often screamed at parts of SL infrastructure so maybe finally we will see some improvements.
I just hope that this will not mean that we will loose tons of date during the switch over. Everything is possible here …..
I am not a techy so I will leave the next paragraph as it is. Hopefully you will be able to tell if this is good or a possible problem and how it is supposed to be working. It sounds good at least: ^_^
For the real techies, here’s the back story: Last month, we moved away from the Isilon storage clusters, as our primary storage for assets. Most assets are now stored on Amazon’s S3 platform, and we have deployed a “middle-layer” caching service, which is where most asset calls will be served from. The time to complete asset “puts” and “gets” (the times that the viewer requests assets and times those assets are delivered) has improved significantly. We reduced the average PUT latency by over 60%, from 1.3 seconds to 0.6 seconds, and our GET latency by 20%, from 0.25 seconds to 0.20 seconds. What does this really mean? Well, when you add up the cumulative time saved in asset latency across the millions of requests a day, there is a net savings of over 4,000 hours of time shaved off of asset latency per day! That translates into less load on the simulator processes and better rez times in Viewer 2.
Faster rezz times … \o/ … I just hope that the new servers will really do it since more often then not it is them that are creating all those issues we have to fight constantly. If it works then it is great that LL has finally done something about it and as it is said .. better late then never .. This is of course not a good strategy in business but at least something gets done.
Now on to the next bomb that is the new chat service and starts with a sentence that makes everyone who has been in SL for a longer period of time rub their eyes:
“We’re finally going to tackle the group chat problem that has been a Resident complaint for a long time.”
I don't know what to say about this one. Other then:
“What has took you so long?!”
I guess, there is nothing more to say about this. I mean, they knew that the problem was there form the start on and despite all the complains they ignored it. Maybe they didn't knew how to fix it until now but I can't really believe it. Will it work? I don't know. So I hope that it will work? Very much so.
I guess the same goes for the next point. A group limit of 40. This was something residents have asked for as well, but other then many of the other bugs or problems, this was one that was known to be a difficult technical issue that wasn't easy to solve given the overall group architecture LL has chosen to use. It would have been a big hit on the performance if more groups would be active and connected for every single avatar and this is also represented in the description given. LL seem to first want to test if SL can take the load and while I almost think that this will lead to a disaster the other points mentioned above might lead to enough savings in the performance so that the grid will be able to take the additional groups. Let them test it! I am all for it since there is a possibility that they will succeed and I too want to have more groups and will happily watch how long it will take for the residents to fill this limit up as well.
Big news in a way. Some of them have been there before and are nothing new but those outlined above are things that will change a lot in SL. I think they might even lower the amount of doomsday posts in the forums and revitalise faith into SL once again. I am not sure it will succeed in the long run but at least it shows that something is being done. They might do more and while I still give a OpenSim like grid more chances, I don't want to see SL fail either. I want to see it join the emerging all out hypergrid!
