I recently blogged about Meuxle Bureaux in Second Life, home of Michael Linden and The Moles of The Linden Department Of Public Works. I’m not alone in admiring the beauty of this sim, as can be seen from a quick glance on Flickr.
Maddy Gynoid has been there too and blogged about it : Meauxle Bureaux: Neue Heimat für das LDPW. There are some impressive pictures in that post as well as a shout out to someone in a language I’m not familiar with, but I don’t think it’s rude :
Gestern hatte ich im Blog von Ciaran Laval gelesen, dass Linden Lab in den vergangenen Tagen eine Reihe neuer Regionen im Second Life Grid gestartet hat. Eine davon heißt “Meauxle Bureaux” und dient nun allem Anschein nach dem Linden Department Of Public Works (LDPW), sowie den dort arbeitenden Moles und ihrem Chef Michael Linden, als neue Heimat.
I saw Marianne McCann flying off in a helicopter and I also saw Uccello Poultry there. Uccie has also blogged about Meauxle Bureaux. However this brings me to a matter of a technical difficulty I experienced there. I planned to take my snapshots of Meauxle Bureaux last Sunday. Alas the sim would not fully load and what did load, was taking a very long time to do so.
I did the teleport in, teleport out, in, out, in, out, shake it all about trick, but the sim still wouldn’t load. Textures were grey, signs and objects were missing. The problems I was experiencing were not localised to Meuxle Bureaux either. I’m a lot more patient in my old age, I put it down to one of those things and returned on Monday, performance was fine then and has been for me all week. I don’t know if my issues were related to Linden Lab’s new Content Delivery Network but Linden Lab have blogged an update on CDN where they state :
For most users most of the time there has been a big performance improvement in texture and mesh data loading, resulting in faster rez times in new areas. The improvement has been realized both on the official viewer and on third party viewers.
However, we have also seen that some users have had the opposite experience, and have worked with a number of those users to collect detailed data on the nature of the problems and shared it with our CDN provider. We believe that the problems are the result of a combination of the considerable additional load we added to the CDN, and a coincidental additional large load on the CDN from another source. Exacerbating matters, flaws in both our viewer code and the CDN caused recovery from these load spikes to be much slower than it should have been. We are working with our CDN provider to increase capacity and to configure the CDN so that Second Life data availability will not be as affected by outside load. We are also making changes to our code and in the CDN to make recovery quicker and more robust.
Some residents have been feeding back the problems they’ve been experiencing on the official Second Life forums. Some of those problems sound very much like the problems I experienced but I really don’t know if my problems were due to the CDN wobbles.
However the statistics for CDN are generally impressive and it’s not that surprising that there are one or two quirks at this stage. Whereas testing does take place, going live, as Linden Lab have done, adds new variables and a wider degree of boundary cases. There’s more stress on the systems and this is something that simply cannot be replicated during a testing phase.
Linden Lab are communicating matters well and are looking at the reported issues, so in the long term this does look like the right solution. If you are experiencing problems, don’t be shy about letting Linden Lab know. However if you are finding performance is improved, don’t be shy about feeding that information back too. The official forum thread is not only the domain of those who aren’t seeing improvements.
However let’s go back to those pesky moles.
This is a location that would be well worth a place in The Destination Guide. The location is photogenic, fun, has some nice hidden extras and ticks a lot of boxes for a good Second Life experience.
Linden Lab continue to do a good job in promoting The Destination Guide on a regular basis these days. The Moles have a destination that should be cherished. However of course, your tastes may vary from mine, you may like Orcs, Pirates, Elves … wait wait wait that still ticks all my boxes too!
SLURL to Meauxle Bureaux : maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Meauxle%20Bureaux/100/126/25