Rolling Restart to deploy 1.24.6, Tue-Thu Sep. 23-25

If this is what you get when you log in don't panic:
There will be a rolling restart this week to deploy server version 1.24.6 to Second Life. Release notes for what is changed may be found on this page on the Second Life Wiki. There are no new features in this release, only bug fixes. The version that will be deployed to Second Life is currently on the Preview Grid on regions running the Second Life Beta Server channel.
The rolling restart will follow this schedule:
Wednesday, 8:30-10PM: a pilot group of ~3000 regions will receive 1.24.6.
Thursday, 5-9AM: half of Second Life will receive 1.24.6.
Friday, 5-9AM: the rest of Second Life will receive 1.24.6
Each region will go down for about 5-10 minutes once during the rolling restart. If your region stays down for more than 20 minutes, please contact support.
Discussion of this rolling restart can be found in this thread in the Second Life forums.

The rolling restart is to fix 2 serious bugs in the last deployment on the forums you will find some interesting discussion and its nice to see Prospero Linden responding reasonably to most of the sensible points on there.

UPDATE: "the server deploy has been postponed a day, and will start either Thursday evening or Friday morning."

Let us hope that the updates go smoothly - I know many have been experiencing an increase in crashes since the mono rollout - fingers crossed everyone.
Dana

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Havok4 introduction completed

It's done. It's finished. It's there. The physics engine, this vital part of the server-side software that Linden Lab uses to control everything in Second Life has been upgraded from version 1 to 4.

Today the last rolling restarts made it happen. The upgrade project was started behind the scenes over a year ago and has been available for testing for everyone on the Beta grid for months and more recently in the early adaptor program. And now it's gone public. Today the last sims were updated and restarted.

So is this the promised milestone that will make everything better? Or is it the introduction of more problems? I've done some research and to be honest, I'm not sure. Time will have to tell.

Two months ago I was in a wild mood and tried the Havok4 Beta. I went out, rezzed about 100 go-karts on a nearly empty Beta sim and made them all physical. Now, you must know that under the old Havok1, this would almost certainly bring everything on that region to a near stop, if not crash the sim completely. I've seen it happen. But I must say, this first try with Havok4 really made me smile! Holy moly, what a big step this would mean. I won't say this test went as smooth as it would be in real life, but the go-karts actually fell down and tumbled down the hill. I could see it happen, and I even could still walk around!

But ... is this really an improvement? Or will it just turn out as one of those things where things get more complicated, and get more buggy? Will it make everything run more smoothly, or will it cause more lag? Again, my first experiences with Havok4, even now that I've seen it on the SL grid, is very positive.

But if you consider that this introduction has been done during a number of other performance problems (specifically this weekend was very bad), one might wonder if they're really doing a smart thing there.

Let's wait and see. For now I'm giving it the benefit of the doubt.

Further reading and explanation on Havok4 can be found in the new Barbwire section, if you're interested. It'll tell you what Havok is and why they were upgrading it.

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