Archive for the 'Events' Category

15
Apr
11

Network testing on ScienceSim

UPDATE!!

The network testing event on ScienceSim has been rescheduled to Wednesday, April 20th 9AM PDT (UTC-7). The login region and other details are unchanged. Thank you,

Dan Lake
Intel Labs
dan.lake at intel.com
—————
The virtual worlds team at Intel has been investigating network performance in OpenSim. We recently made changes to prioritization and queuing of scene updates, adaptive client throttles and packet resend timers. Our validation so far has used mostly synthetic workloads but the results indicate greatly improved network performance, especially for high latency and low bandwidth clients.

We are conducting a networking test in ScienceSim next Tuesday and invite OpenSim users from all geographic locations to join us. We will be running our distributed scene graph (dsg) with a high client/avatar count and logging queues, throttles, and bandwidth characteristics of connected clients.

When: Tuesday, April 19. 9AM PDT (UTC-7).

Where: Login to ‘welcome0419′ region on ScienceSim and teleport to a test region from there.

IRC: island.sciencesim.com/6667

#perftest

We’ll plan on running for an hour but something will probably break sooner. If you come by, please tell us about your experience on IRC or via email. I’m interested in which viewer you are using and how you are connected to the Internet.

ScienceSim account creation: http://www.sciencesim.com/simian/

Hypergrid probably works but we have not tested it with the dsg regions. I recommend making an account if possible.

Hope you can make it. Thanks,

Dan Lake
Intel Labs
dan.lake@intel.com

08
Apr
11

.ini changes for new 04-07-2011 release

Hello everyone,

There are some new .ini changes in the 04-07-2011 release for osgrid (http://www.osgrid.org/index.php/downloads)

The first change is in the GridCommon.ini are as follows, in the [GridService] section

[GridService]
    ;
    ; change this to your grid-wide grid server
    ;
    GridServerURI = "http://grid.osgrid.org"
    AllowHypergridMapSearch = true

    ;; Directory for map tile images of linked regions
    MapTileDirectory = "./maptiles"

    ; === HG ONLY ===
	;; change this to the address of your Gatekeeper service
	;; (usually bundled with the rest of the services in one
	;; Robust server in port 8002, but not always)
	Gatekeeper="http://hg.osgrid.org:80"


The changes to this section will prevent automatic hyperlinks from being created on map searches for hypergrid enabled regions, this was causing issues with all map searches that took place after the initial search and all caused all subsequent teleports within the grid to region with the same name as the automatic linking to fail.

The next changes are to the OpenSim.ini and were recommended to me by Mic Bowman from Intel Labs, Intel has been doing exhaustive testing and submitting patches to opensimulator project that should improve networking performance considerably, I have been doing some testing and things are looking very good, some major improvements.  These patches are still not in the core branch and are not quite ready for everyone just yet, but these .ini changes to OpenSim.ini can be used now and we would like everyone to update and give them a try, please let me know right away if you see any improvements or declines in performance after these changes, they are not required but the testing I have done so far seems to show some improvements overall, all the OSgrid Plazas have been running them for the past week or so and everything seems quite normal.  The new section is listed below:

[ClientStack.LindenUDP]
    ;; See OpensSimDefaults.ini for the throttle options. You can copy the
    ;; relevant sections and override them here.
    ;; DO NOT MODIFY OpenSimDefaults.ini, as your changes would be lost
    ;; with the next update!

    async_packet_handling = true

    ; The client socket receive buffer size determines how many
    ; incoming requests we can process; the default on .NET is 8192
    ; which is about 2 4k-sized UDP datagrams. On mono this is
    ; whatever the underlying operating system has as default; for
    ; example, ubuntu 8.04 or SLES11 have about 111k, which is about
    ; 27 4k-sized UDP datagrams (on linux platforms you can [as root]
    ; do "sysctl net.core.rmem_default" to find out what your system
    ; uses a default socket receive buffer size.
    ;
    ; client_socket_rcvbuf_size allows you to specify the receive
    ; buffer size LLUDPServer should use. NOTE: this will be limited
    ; by the system's settings for the maximum client receive buffer
    ; size (on linux systems you can set that with "sysctl -w
    ; net.core.rmem_max=X")
    ;
    client_socket_rcvbuf_size = 8388608

    ; Maximum outbound bytes per second for a single scene. This can be used to
    ; throttle total outbound UDP traffic for a simulator. The default value is
    ; 0, meaning no throttling at the scene level. The example given here is
    ; 20 megabits
    ;
    scene_throttle_max_bps = 800000

    ; Maximum bits per second to send to any single client. This will override
    ; the user's viewer preference settings. The default value is 0, meaning no
    ; aggregate throttling on clients (only per-category throttling). The
    ; example given here is 1.5 megabits
    ;
    client_throttle_max_bps = 100000

    ; Per-client bytes per second rates for the various throttle categories.
    ; These are default values that will be overriden by clients
    ;
    resend_default = 10000
    land_default = 10000
    wind_default = 10000
    cloud_default = 10000
    task_default = 10000
    texture_default = 20000
    asset_default = 20000
    state_default = 10000

    ; Per-client maximum burst rates in bytes per second for the various
    ; throttle categories. These are default values that will be overriden by
    ; clients
    ;
    resend_limit = 18750
    land_limit = 29750
    wind_limit = 18750
    cloud_limit = 18750
    task_limit = 18750
    texture_limit = 55750
    asset_limit = 27500
    state_limit = 37000

    ; Configures how ObjectUpdates are aggregated. These numbers
    ; do not literally mean how many updates will be put in each
    ; packet that goes over the wire, as packets are
    ; automatically split on a 1400 byte boundary. These control
    ; the balance between responsiveness of interest list updates
    ; and total throughput. Higher numbers will ensure more full-
    ; sized packets and faster sending of data, but more delay in
    ; updating interest lists
    ;
    ;PrimUpdatesPerCallback = 100

    ; TextureSendLimit determines how many packets will be put on
    ; the outgoing queue each cycle. Like the settings above, this
    ; is a balance between responsiveness to priority updates and
    ; total throughput. Higher numbers will give a better
    ; throughput at the cost of reduced responsiveness to client
    ; priority changes or transfer aborts
    ;
    ;TextureSendLimit = 20

    ; Quash and remove any light properties from attachments not on the
    ; hands. This allows flashlights and lanterns to function, but kills
    ; silly vanity "Facelights" dead. Sorry, head mounted miner's lamps
    ; will also be affected.
    ;
    ;DisableFacelights = "false"


A few other notable changes with this release are  that you can now take Coalesced objects, meaning you can actually take multi-prim objects without linking them and have them be one object in your inventory, please note that if your region is hypergrid enabled this function does not work yet, but we do hope to address this issue soon, you can however rez coalesced objects in hypergrid enabled regions, you can just not take them yet.  Next notable thing is that Justin Clark-Casey has fixed sqlite for mac users, you no longer need to use the legacy driver for Mac OSX. here are the notes from Justin’s fix:

Bundle a built-from-source Mac OS X sqlite3 universal dylib with OpenSim and use this instead of the system one.

This means that Mac OS X users can now use the standard sqlite adaptor instead of the legacy one.
This is SQLite 3.7.5.  I configured the build with the line

CFLAGS="-Os -g -isysroot /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.6.sdk -arch i386 -arch x86_64 -arch ppc7400 -DSQLITE_ENABLE_COLUMN_METADATA" LDFLAGS="-arch i386 -arch x86_64 -arch ppc7400" ./configure --disable-dependency-tracking

The SQLITE_ENABLE_COLUMN_METADATA flag exports the metadata symbols that modern Mono SQLite adaptors need.
The -Os removes debugging symbols (as per the sqlite3 source pkg README)
The other parts are to cross compile for x86_64, i386 and ppc.  On Mac OS X, Mono can actually only P/INVOKE 32-bit libraries even on 64 bit platforms so i386 is being used.  The dylib has not been tested on ppc.


Please note I have not been able to test the new sqlite adapter for Mac OSX as I do not have the proper equipment, if you do get a chance to test it please report how it went.

Thanks everyone, if you have any questions about these changes or would like to report any changes in performance you see please visit our IRC channel on freenode (irc.freenode.net) on #osgrid or click here for our webchat.  Thank you everyone and good luck.

Download New Update Here

Michael Emory Cerqoni
President – OSgrid Inc.

01
Mar
11

New Plaza, Old Games: Speedbuild, and…

PRIMWORDS! :D

I have been given the long-awaited opportunity to resurrect the Speedbuild event and PrimWords game after a hiatus of several months. We had a trial run of the Speedbuild at the Sandbox Plazas (both of them) and it was very difficult considering all the activity there.
So Nebadon decided to make a fresh new Plaza specifically for games and events, and named it… what else? …[drum roll and trumpets]… but Recreation Plaza!

Speedbuild is a leisurely, timed building competition originated by Alyvaral Aeghin in late 2008 or early ’09, not sure exactly when, and carried on through the end of 2009 by Adelle Fitzgerald. One hour to build to a theme which is secret until the start of the game clock. More detailed rules and guidelines here: viewtopic.php?f=3&t=3124

PrimWords is a fun team game, like Pictionary, but you build with prims instead of draw pictures. The game’s scoreboard, rules and scripts were developed by Warin Cascabel, one of OSGrid’s early pioneers and our resident script guru who has sadly been rather scarce lately due to RL obligations.

There is a group for each of the games, please join if you are interested in participating so you will get timely notices of event occurances. Do a group search for OSGrid Speedbuild and PrimWords.

Our first official Speedbuild event on the new Plaza occurred on Sunday, Feb. 27 and you can see pictures at http://gallery.osgrid.org/main.php?g2_itemId=6863

The next Speedbuild is scheduled for Saturday, March 5 at 12 pm PST (Linden time), or 8 pm GMT / 20:00 UTC / 3 pm US Eastern time. It is best to be a few minutes early to give the region time to recover from multiple logins and teleports.

The first official PrimWords game will be held on Wednesday, March 2 at the same exact time: 12 pm PST (Linden time), or 8 pm GMT / 20:00 UTC / 3 pm US Eastern time.

I will try to stick with the same schedule for as long as I am organizing the games, and hope to be doing this for many months so it becomes a regular thing in people’s minds. Let’s have some group fun people!

Key Gruin

26
Jan
11

ATTENTION : Grid Down Time 1/27/2011 at 12:00pm eastern

Hello everyone,

As I am sure everyone has probably noticed by now that our website user registration and web log in have been disabled for several days now.  I would like to reassure everyone that these were simply growing pains that we have experienced with our database and simply nothing else.   Dave Coyle has spent the last few days reviewing and tweaking a lot of our Database queries and indexes and has converted our inventory tables on Danger grid to innodb, something we had planned to do at the last grid outage but simply ran out of time and decided it was better to put it off until we had the proper amount of time, and I am happy to say that the time is now.  Our testing on danger grid has yielded some very positive results in terms of grid and website performance, unfortunately it requires us to take the grid down for approximately 24 hours to complete, might be less, might be more, we do not want to over promise anything at this point.  So starting at 12:00PM Eastern Standard Time on January 27th 2011 we will be downing the grid to being this process.  We will be providing updates as things progress via twitter, so if you are not already following us on twitter you may want to now @ http://twitter.com/osgrid.   I would like to thank all of our grid testers and users for making these improvements possible.

There is also a new release I will be posting on the website today (OSgrid 0.7.1 (Dev) c472764: 2011-01-26).  This version has several improvements towards avatar appearance and log ins, as well as improved Hypergriding and teleporting.  Some of the changes i would like to specificially point out are in the OpenSim.ini itself, the changes are shown below:

lines 293-305

———————————————-

; Maximum outbound bytes per second for a single scene. This can be used to
; throttle total outbound UDP traffic for a simulator. The default value is
; 0, meaning no throttling at the scene level. The example given here is
; 20 megabits
;
scene_throttle_max_bps = 800000

; Maximum bits per second to send to any single client. This will override
; the user’s viewer preference settings. The default value is 0, meaning no
; aggregate throttling on clients (only per-category throttling). The
; example given here is 1.5 megabits
;
client_throttle_max_bps = 70000

———————————————-

lines 718:729

———————————————-

[PacketPool]
; Enables the experimental packet pool. Yes, we’ve been here before.
RecyclePackets = true;
RecycleDataBlocks = true;

[InterestManagement]
;# {UpdatePrioritizationScheme} {} {Update prioritization scheme?} {BestAvatarResponsiveness Time Distance SimpleAngularDistance FrontBack} BestAvatarResponsiveness
;; This section controls how state updates are prioritized for each client
;; Valid values are BestAvatarResponsiveness, Time, Distance,
;; SimpleAngularDistance, FrontBack
UpdatePrioritizationScheme = BestAvatarResponsiveness
ReprioritizationEnabled = true

———————————————-

These changes should have a profound effect on busier regions on the grid, it enables bandwidth throttles so no one person can suck away all your bandwith, as well as re-enables the previously disabled Update re-prioritization which lets the prims closest to your avatar rez 1st for a better experience.  If you experience any issues with this update as usual please contact us on our web chat for assistance.

Thanks everyone and stay tuned!

Michael Emory Cerquoni

OSgrid Inc President

08
Nov
10

Mandatory Simulator Upgrade 11/09/2010

Hello everyone,

As you might already know we have a major upgrade scheduled for Tuesday Nov 9th at 5pm PST (Nov 10th 01:00:00 UTC) This is a mandatory for all sim operators.  If you are running a simulator on osgrid you will be required to update your regions to the new version (yet to be posted).  I will be posting a new version Tuesday morning so everyone can prepare early if they so choose, but we will not flip the switch on the back end until 5pm (PST).  Once we do upgrade the back end older versions of the OSgrid release will no longer be able to connect, the reason for this is a protocol change to how Avatar appearances are handled.

Quote from Git Change Logs:
“It contains a major interface version bump and will NOT work with earlier grid
services. This is preliminary work that will lead to layers support.”

Some of the other fixes will include, Hair in the center of your screen when huds are attached, Prim Piles at <0,0,0> that crash your viewer when touched, Cross Grid Instant Message Issues, Avatar Appearance at log in, and many other performance improvements!

There will be one new change to OpenSim.ini , which you can actually add now before the upgrade and see some significant improvments as well, the changes are as follows below

find the [ClientStack.LindenUDP] section in your OpenSim.ini

add the following line below inside this section

async_packet_handling = true

here is a description of what this setting does:

“Set this to true to process incoming packets asynchronously. Networking is already separated from packet handling with a queue, so this will only affect whether networking internals such as packet decoding and  acknowledgement accounting are done synchronously or asynchronously Default is true.”

If you find this setting has any ill effects please do let us know right away.

We hope that all the changes will improve the overall experience on OSgrid, however there is still a lot of work ahead to improve many things.  If you are interested in reading all of the patch descriptions you can view the git logs here : http://opensimulator.org/viewgit/?a=summary&p=opensim.

If you have any questions or need guidance please join us on our IRC channel @ irc.freenode.net #osgrid or you can use the website chat here to connect : http://www.osgrid.org/index.php/freenode , you can also follow us at twitter for the fastest way to receive grid updates : http://twitter.com/osgrid.

Michael Emory Cerquoni

OSgrid Inc. President

18
Oct
10

**Grid Upgrade Status Update

Hello Everyone,

I just wanted to let everyone know that the updates are going well, things are taking a bit longer than we expected in converting some of our databases to innodb from myisam.  We wanted to convert all of our databases to innodb, but it looks like its going to just take too long, we did however get about 50% of the tables converted so its a start, unfortunately if we were to convert the inventory table it would have taken at least another 24 hours and we felt that was just too much downtime for this outage.   Things are late now for the OSgrid admins and we need to get some sleep, but we will be back early in the morning for a few more hours of work to bring the website and Robust service online.  We would like to thank everyone for their patience and all the testing and reporting everyone has been doing.   Keep checking back for more updates, we will post some more information soon when we are closer to bringing the grid back online, thanks again everyone.

Michael Emory Cerquoni

OSgrid Inc. President

15
Oct
10

OSgrid 0.7.x Release for pre-setup / inspection

Hello everyone,

I have just created a new release for OSgrid OpenSimulator v0.7.x (0.7.1.cd4d7a7).  I must stress though NO ONE SHOULD BE UPGRADING YET!!!!!  This pre-release is so everyone can prep their regions and get a feel for the upcoming ini changes and differences for their automated upgrade processes.  I have written some instructions for everyone to follow that will hopefully minimize problems during the upgrade process and they are available at the following links:

Plain Text Instructions : http://upgrade.osgrid.org/README.txt

Pretty HTML Instructions : http://upgrade.osgrid.org/README.htm

you can also inspect all the individual components that go into a release here http://upgrade.osgrid.org

Again no one should try to perform an upgrade until we announce its time to pull the trigger, then everyone can move forward, this will likely be sometime Late on Sunday Night or Early Monday Morning (Eastern/US Time) so please keep checking back for updates.  You can also join us on our IRC channel #osgrid at irc.freenode.net  or click here http://upgrade.osgrid.org/chat-help.htm if you have any questions or need guidance.

Thanks everyone

Michael Emory Cerquoni

OSgrid Inc. President

11
Oct
10

a Prelude to the big Upgrade to OpenSimulator v0.7

Hello again everyone

The time is finally here for OSgrid to move forward to version 0.7 of OpenSimulator, something we all have been excited about and waiting for and now the time is here. The plan is that this Sunday, October 17th at 9am US/Eastern (13:00 UTC) we will be taking the grid offline for approximately 24 hours to begin transitioning all of the main grid data not only on to v0.7 but also new hardware for the grid and website services. We ask that everyone be patient during this process as while we are confident that things will and should go smoothly, we can not predict exactly how things will actually go. We ask that all sim operators make sure that they have good solid OAR backups and SQL Dumps of their sims and it might even be a good time for you to make an IAR backup of your inventory if you have access to a sim console. These are all good practices you should be doing on a regular basis anyway, but this is a good week to refresh the practice if you have not been doing it religiously.

Some of the things you should be aware of is that sim configurations will change slightly. We will be sure to post some sample configurations and even a full 0.7 release prior to the grid switching over so everyone can take some time to get a good look at things before the actual switch over occurs. We are aware that there may be some issues in migrating databases during the upgrade process of your simulators, but we will have some working solutions available and we will be providing support via the IRC chat room and Forums during the downtime and as the grid starts to come back online and everyone begins the upgrade process. If you have any questions or concerns about this process please join us on our IRC channel #osgrid at irc.freenode.net or via the chat link on the main website.

There are some very exciting things to look forward to in OpenSimulator v0.7 including Windlight Sharing and the ability to control Windlight Settings with scripting commands. We will also have some preliminary support for media on a prim which allows you to show flash and more complex and interactive HTML websites on prims within your simulator, I have even seen examples of people doing VNC and controlling real computers via their simulator. There are a multitude of bug fixes and simulator improvements that are part of 0.7, you can read the developer release notes here (http://opensimulator.org/wiki/0.7_Release). You should however be very aware that there may be bugs that the OSgrid and OpenSimulator developers are still not aware of, because OSgrid is the largest OpenSimulator Grid and testing is very important part of this grid, v0.7 has not got the proper venting it would normally be getting if OSgrid was running it, so everyone should be prepared for some unexpected things, perhaps bugs and even things not functioning as they did in 0.6.9 releases of OpenSimulator. So I will ask once more that everyone please remain patient for the foreseeable future, this is a very major upgrade release and we will do our best to work with everyone during this phase, but we are only volunteers and there are only so many hours in a day, but we will do our best to make sure no one gets left behind or ignored.

And lastly, the website is going to change drastically, while Elgg has served its purposes for the last year, most of the administrators have grown to be very frustrated with it in terms of being able to easily manage content, users and all its quirks and bugs. We made a decision some time back that because of v0.7′s drastic database changes that would have basiclly forced us to completely refactor Elgg once again we came to the conclusion that it was much easier to just start completley over using a framework that made more sense and was available to everyone so more than just the OSgrid administrators can expand and contribute to. After much searching and contemplating we decided that Simiangrid was the best choice for OSgrid and would bring much more experience to the table in terms of getting stuff done. Just to be clear OSgrid will not be running a Simiangrid back end, we will be staying on the OpenSimulator Robust services, we instead have created a SimianGrid Frontend API to allow it to speak to a Robust based back end, called Zira. Our own Dave Coyle has facilitated most of the work for this API and will be working hard this week to tack on the finish touches and buff out the remaining work. However you will notice that a lot of the functionality we have become accustomed to using with our ELGG front end are not yet available, this does not mean we are completely abandoning those functions, it just means we decided that it was more important that OSgrid get onto 0.7 before we spent many more months working out all new code to replace the lost functionality. We will be retaining all the data from the previous website, some will be transitioned eventually, some will not. We will speak more about this over the coming weeks but for now our focus is getting on to 0.7. So one last time I will remind everyone that patience will be key in this very complex transition, in the end it will all be for the better but there will be many bumps and potholes in the road before we arrive at our destination.

Thank you everyone for making OSgrid the awesome place it has become, without all of you we would never have made it this far.

Michael Emory Cerquoni

OSgrid Inc. President

15
Jul
10

OSG3B Load Test (Friday July 16 5pm PST)

Hello Again Everyone,

As you all know OSgrids 3rd Birthday is coming up July 22-26 and we would like to perform some load tests on the Celebration region this weekend,  The 1st test will be 5pm PST this Friday (July 16).  I would like to get around 50 people on “OSG3B Celebration” So if you have some time on Friday night lets everyone gather up some friends and meet at this region to see how things hold up.  We will probably do some more load tests over the weekend depending on how this 1st round goes, I will update with times as we figure things out.   Also just a reminder we do have some open spaces left, so if you are interested in putting up a parcel display or even just some smaller displays around the sim please contact me on the forums or in world and let me know what you want to do.  Also, if you are a DJ or Musical performer, or even know friends who are and would like to perform at OSG3B we would love to have you, again just contact me on the forums on in world and we can work out times and locations.  Also Eryn Galen is making a OSGazet Special Edition OSG3B, and if you would like to advertise anything or contribute articles about OSgrid or OSG3B please contact her on the forums or in world.   That is really all i have for now, but keep checking back and check out the forums for times events and things to come.   Thanks to everyone who already has contributed, lets make OSG3B the best OSgrid Birthday yet!!

Thanks Everyone

You can leave comments or schedule events and request party parcels here : http://osgrid.org/forums/viewforum.php?f=25

24
Nov
09

Winterfest 2009

Come join us this Sunday for a winter skating party! Free ice skates provided at the skate shack with “tricks” to wow your friends.
Relax in the cozy lodge or show us your stuff out on the frozen pond!
Also there are freebie gifts scattered about the sim. Go on a hunt for them and collect all 15.
Winterfest 2009 will be up and running through December with weekly events so check back for more info!

Region: southsea
Time: Starts 1400 UTC November 29th – open all December – events will be listed.

Contact Christy Lock inworld for more info. Or check http://www.gridfest.info




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