SecondLife : Current State of SL Server's : Mayhem or Method To The Madness ?

By Avatar JayR Cela

    I attended Andrew Lindens weekly SL Server meeting yesterday, it was quite interesting, to say the least. The turnout was great, quite a few people I have not seen since my involvement with the AWG and former Zero Linden's Meta Verse, Inter-Op meetings back in 2008 - 2009 or so were there.

   

    The meeting started out with a discussion on why Group Chat is still so incredibly Borked ! My Gawd, it has been broken since 2005, you would think that 7 years is more than a reasonable enough time frame within which to fix the problem. Anyways as usual the Proverbial Buck was passed around as to whom or what was responsible for this thorn in LL's side. Everything from why the IRC client Jabber ( this was my proposal to the AWG back in 2008 ) was tried, but according to Andrew supporting it was to hard. Then last year XMPP was given the green light briefly, but that was ultimately determined to be unworkable as well. So as it stands right now, its a virtual toss up, either fix the current ( and antiquated ) existing system, or do a complete start from scratch, trash the existing system ( which obviously does not work ) and go for broke. The problem here seem's to be no one knew who is currently heading up work on that project. In other words the Lab is still kicking the idea around, or more simply stated, don't hold your breath !

    The next topic oddly enough next turned to support for V1.x  I'm not even going to bother going into this subject, because The Cool Viewer and Singularity have managed to backport huge amounts of V3 code into their 1.x viewers already, and will more and likely continue to do so into the foreseeable future.

    Windlight was next up for discussion, apparently there are some obscure problems rearing their ugly little heads occasionally now and again. Also something or other about why the World Map seems to be screwed up lately.

    Then the Biggy, Region ( Sim ) crossing's and why they are still screwed up ! There are a lot of good reason's ( excuse's ) for this problem. I have long held the belief that lousy Load Balancing on the back end is the main culprit, and a bunch of other stuff dealing with script size's and things I just quite frankly don't understand. However, not everything is within the Lab's control. I'm talking about the Client computer's with their various Internet connection speed's, for one. And there is nothing the Lab can do about that, EXCEPT, Maybe, Larger Region's, say 1024 x 1024km as opposed to the current 512 x 512km. ( As a side note several Open Sim vendors are successfully experimenting with, and doing just that as of now ) This just being a Band-Aid approach and would not eliminate the problem. We would just have less of it. Unfortunately just like the Group Chat issue, this idea is still in the state of being kicked around.

    Look I know that I can be a bit cynical, and sarcastic with my opinion's sometimes, and I know that this stuff is the proverbial Rocket Science crap that would drive most folk's completely bonkers trying to figure it all out.

    The part that just blows my mind is, why are they ( we ) still talking about and trying to solve the same damn problems that people have been bitching about since I first came to SL in 2005 ? Personally I Do Not See Any Method To The Madness.

JayR Cela :(