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World hacking and coughing

Posted: Sun May 09, 2021 2:31 am
by Snoots Dwagon
We had the Sendalonde Library Grand Opening today. Things went well until the party. We had about oh... 10 or 12 people there (I didn't count). None were wearing high-level avatars; we were all in basic dress. About half were in simple "pirate garb"-- relatively low AC.

We had two devices going: a sound feed and the standard dance ball. Both were failing on a regular basis. The sound would cut out for lengthy periods. About the same time the dance ball would stop animating... then pick up again several minutes later.

Finally the DJ gave us the direct URL and encouraged us all to switch to browser sound feed (turning off Viewer music feed). We all did so... and immediately the Dance Ball started working perfectly... no glitches after that. The music feed coming across the Net to a separate browser was equally flawless and even better quality sound.

It is evident the system could not handle the sound feed and dance ball both at the same time... and this was a small party. Imagine if we'd had 30 or 40 people attending.

The world: Wellspring. Time: 2pm Saturday May 8.

I'm wondering if it would help to do a behind-the-scenes world performance check and see if there is anything major that might cause an issue. Because for a certainty, the server wasn't up to the task today. What we need to find out is if it's Opensim, or Firestorm, or Wellspring that was the cause of the problem. The problem was definite, consistent and observable by all attending.

Thanks for assist.

Re: World hacking and coughing

Posted: Sun May 09, 2021 10:30 am
by Ilan Tochner
Hi Snoots,

Music isn't streamed from Kitely's servers, it's streamed from the media URL source directly to the viewer. As for the dance ball, are you saying the ball would stop spinning, that avatar dance animations that were started from it stopped or that you couldn't use it to start new animations?

Re: World hacking and coughing

Posted: Mon May 10, 2021 4:04 am
by Snoots Dwagon
The dance ball would stop animating the avatars for several minutes, and then restart (as best I could tell). Interestingly this would happen about the same time the music stream stopped.

Unfortunately this isn't something I can test extensively, so just reporting this as something all attendees experienced (ie, it wasn't just my computer and viewer; the problem was noted by everyone at the party).

Re: World hacking and coughing

Posted: Mon May 10, 2021 7:43 am
by Ilan Tochner
Did the world owner look at the Active World panel on that world's World Page to check if there was a CPU spike or networking problem on that world when you were experiencing these issues?

Not being able to interact with a world due to high load could cause the viewer to freeze, which may effect how other download processes in the viewer (such as streaming the music from it's.media URL) behave as well.

Alternatively, it's possible that problems with sending the media stream from the media URL could cause the viewer networking problems that would affect its communication with the world when you send object interaction commands.

Re: World hacking and coughing

Posted: Mon May 10, 2021 4:13 pm
by Snoots Dwagon
No one thought to check on the Active Panel during the event.

Ilan: "Not being able to interact with a world due to high load could cause the viewer to freeze, which may effect how other download processes in the viewer (such as streaming the music from it's.media URL) behave as well."

There shouldn't have been anywhere near a high load at a party with only 10 or so people there. So I don't see that as a likely cause.

The interesting clues here are:

1. The moment everyone switched the music feed from Viewer to Browser, the dance machine started working fine. No glitches after that.
2. The attendance was low-count
3. The problem was experienced by all in attendance with members all over the globe (ruling out individual computer or Internet issues).
4. Since switching the music to browser fixed it... it seems likely that streaming music is over-powering the Viewer. As this has not happened (to my experience) at far larger events on other grids (up to 90 people), that should give devs some idea of where to look (either Kitely or Firestorm or both).

Just trying to help in the exploration and debug phase. : )