User:Which Linden/Office Hours/2009 Nov 5

• [11:01] Arawn Spitteler: wonders if Enkidu is any relationto Enki
• [11:01] Morgaine Dinova: Hi Moon, Latif --- hi all :-)
• [11:01] Latif Khalifa: hey enkidu, the master of the interwebtubes
• [11:01] Enkidu Linden: hey guys
• [11:01] lonetorus Habilis: HAI bluekitty
• [11:01] Morgaine Dinova: Hi Enk
• [11:01] Clexor Denfu: hello
• [11:01] Latif Khalifa: hey which
• [11:01] Which Linden: yello!
• [11:01] Moon Metty: hi Enkidu, Which :)
• [11:01] Morgaine Dinova: Hiya lone :-)
• [11:01] Latif Khalifa: something is seriously killing my viewer here, i'm at below 10 fps now
• [11:02] Moon Metty: i have 27 fps
• [11:02] Which Linden: sorry that was me, I had a burrito
• [11:02] Latif Khalifa: hahah
• [11:02] Arawn Spitteler: likes hovering around four of five fps, which nothing can slow
• [11:02] Which Linden: "I'm already at rock bottom!"
• [11:02] Enkidu Linden: brb
• [11:03] Which Linden: I can't seem to get any higher than 10 on my mac
• [11:03] Latif Khalifa: if you think your fps cannot get any lower -- you're wrong ;)
• [11:03] Which Linden: This sort of conversation makes me think of the old IRC quotes on bash.org where people talk about their uptimes
• [11:03] Moon Metty: hi Ardy :)
• [11:03] Ardy Lay: Hi
• [11:03] Arawn Spitteler: I've heard of one person at One FPS
• [11:03] Morgaine Dinova: Hiya Which :-)
• [11:04] Enkidu Linden: i got 30000 fps here
• [11:04] Which Linden: And invariably they're measured in days. Now I don't care about uptime because it's measured in years.
• [11:04] Moon Metty: lol frames per day
• [11:04] Which Linden: heh
• [11:04] Latif Khalifa: hahah
• [11:06] Which Linden: So we finally got a viewer dev to look at that bug we were discussing a few weeks ago
• [11:06] Which Linden: The duplicate payments bug
• [11:07] Moon Metty: for uploads?
• [11:07] Which Linden: SVC-4637
• [11:07] JIRA-helper: http//jira.secondlife.com/browse/SVC-4637:
• [#SVC-4637] Payments -: Pay on pie menu sometimes pays twice
• [11:07] Which Linden: So that should hopefully enter development soon. (I should say it's entered viewe triage)
• [11:07] Which Linden: We have high latency in our development organization, but reasonable throughput
• [11:08] Which Linden: Other interesting facts: mysql database connection overhead is not free!
• [11:09] Which Linden: It adds about 20% overhead overall
• [11:09] Latif Khalifa: lol
• [11:09] Which Linden: rleative to connection pooling
• [11:09] Youri Ashton: hello everyone!
• [11:09] Latif Khalifa: tcp handshake is expensive too, not to mention such high level thing as db connection
• [11:10] Latif Khalifa: especially for hit-and-run kind of tasks
• [11:10] Which Linden: Hm true -- it may be the case that mysql handshake adds little to the TCP handshake
• [11:10] Which Linden: Connection overhead is ~ .39 ms
• [11:11] Which Linden: For mysql on our system -- not sure what it would be for TCP (I should find out)
• [11:11] Latif Khalifa: on the other hand, there only so many concurrent db connections a server can handle
• [11:11] Latif Khalifa: Which what is ping time between the two?
• [11:11] Which Linden: Not sure
• [11:12] Latif Khalifa: tcp alone takes 3 round trips
• [11:12] Which Linden: That is on localhost
• [11:12] Which Linden: The .39 ms is
• [11:12] Latif Khalifa: then tcp should not add any additional latency, that's pure mysql
• [11:12] Which Linden: I guess so!
• [11:13] Which Linden: well actually....hm
• [11:13] Arawn Spitteler: TCP shouldn't be needed, since any commercial transaction needs its own bug checking
• [11:13] Which Linden: Oh NM, yueah, you're right, it's all MySQL
• [11:14] Which Linden: Wow I can't type
• [11:14] Which Linden: Not sure what you mean Arawn, I don't think anyone uses TCP as a means to avoid checking input
• [11:15] Clexor Denfu: accepted your inventory offer.
• [11:15] Latif Khalifa: you can connct to tcp in two ways, local named pipe (unix socket) or tcp, nothing else ;)
• [11:15] Latif Khalifa: to mysql
• [11:16] Arawn Spitteler: A major problem in SL, is the use of UDP, which does no error checking, instead of TCP, which checks for errors. In a financial transaction, accounting procedures should already contain the error checks.
• [11:16] Arawn Spitteler: It's one area, where UDP would be safe
• [11:16] Which Linden: Well the issue with UDP is actually more about flow control, though the checksumming is definitely a bonus
• [11:17] Which Linden: But if you're downloading a few megabytes of rows you want to use a flow/deduplication/retrying algorithm that's been developed for 30 years
• [11:18] Which Linden: Latif: yeah good point about unix sockets, using those for the benchmark would eliminate all TCP connection overhead (not that we really care what subsystem is at fault -- the point is still the same :-)
• [11:19] Latif Khalifa: do you use standard libmysql?
• [11:19] Latif Khalifa: they're a bit strange when it comes to that ;)
• [11:19] Latif Khalifa: if
• [11:19] Latif Khalifa: if you specify "localhost" to libmysql it will actually use unix socket instead of a tcp connection
• [11:20] Which Linden: We use MySQLdb which is a python wrapper around the standard lib
• [11:20] Latif Khalifa: ah
• [11:21] lonetorus Habilis: uptimes XD [1] (at my work)
• [11:21] Which Linden: Nice!
• [11:21] Which Linden: Way to go FreeBSD!
• [11:22] lonetorus Habilis: hehe yeah we like :D
• [11:22] Latif Khalifa: hope it's not extermally accesible :D
• [11:22] lonetorus Habilis: the photo was taken before it was powered down and migrated to a vm image
• [11:23] Which Linden: Oh man, a more civilized weapon for a more civilized age
• [11:23] Latif Khalifa: but 10 years without a reboot is impressive, nontheless
• [11:23] lonetorus Habilis: and i dont think that domain even exists anymore, thats like 3 mergers back in company history XD
• [11:23] Moon Metty: indeed
• [11:23] Moon Metty: nice doomsday device
• [11:24] Latif Khalifa: which, you are mostly working on sim <=> backend stuff, right?
• [11:24] lonetorus Habilis: and we had the classic "billing server enclosed inside a drywall" aswell
• [11:25] lonetorus Habilis: and sorry if i highjacked topic, ill just shut up agian
• [11:25] Which Linden: Latif: yeah, which is why I don't generally talk about what I'm working on -- I don't have much that's publically shareable
• [11:25] Which Linden: I guess I was working on the transactions page
• [11:26] lonetorus Habilis: it must be hell trying to remember what you can and what cant be talked about
• [11:26] Which Linden: Where "working on" means "yelling at Enkidu"
• [11:26] Enkidu Linden: haha
• [11:26] Latif Khalifa: i was wondering how is it going with moveing stuff over to caps in viewer <=> sim domain
• [11:26] Enkidu Linden: i just turned the volume on my headset way down
• [11:26] Youri Ashton: my sound is evne muted
• [11:26] Youri Ashton: much easier :p
• [11:26] Which Linden: Verdict on the new transactions page? Looks ok?
• [11:27] Moon Metty: it looks ok to me
• [11:27] Which Linden: Latif: moving things to caps is going slowly -- it's not someone's job to do that, so it happens opportunistically
• [11:27] Latif Khalifa: i see caps get enabled, and then prompty disabled lol
• [11:27] Which Linden: Heh yeah that's how we deploy them
• [11:27] Latif Khalifa: like WebFetchInventoryDescendants
• [11:27] Which Linden: On off on off
• [11:28] Which Linden: Moon: I think you mispelled "totally awesome" :-P
• [11:28] Latif Khalifa: makes downloading inv fast, but someone mentioned that it burned down inv mysql servers when it got turned on lol
• [11:28] Moon Metty: hahaha
• [11:28] Moon Metty: well, i'm not an expert Which
• [11:28] Arawn Spitteler: So, Caps get their on and off bits ant how many Baud?
• [11:28] Moon Metty: but i asked Roberto, and he thought it is cool
• [11:29] Enkidu Linden: takes it to the bank
• [11:29] lonetorus Habilis: Which, so will this mean, that it wont drop transactions anymore?
• [11:29] Which Linden: So yeah the inventory thing, that is eventually destined to go on again, it was turned on briefly to investigate server load
• [11:29] lonetorus Habilis: or is sthis chnage purely cosmetic?
• [11:29] Latif Khalifa: Enkidu, now make secondlife.com perform better than geoities, and you can take it to the bank ;)
• [11:30] Which Linden: Ionetorus: uh... well one part of the system should behave better in that regard, we didn't fix everything at once
• [11:30] Enkidu Linden: i actually am working on that
• [11:30] Latif Khalifa: great
• [11:30] lonetorus Habilis: one of my friends has the problem, that he has so high volume of transactions that even the excel has been incomplete at times
• [11:30] lonetorus Habilis: also missing description texts
• [11:30] Latif Khalifa: i want to have that problem too!
• [11:30] Which Linden: orly....your friend should chunk up his downloads by the hour
• [11:31] lonetorus Habilis: yeah, he dl 4 times a day now
• [11:31] Enkidu Linden: he should switch to xml too
• [11:31] Which Linden: not really sure how we could drop descriptions ... it may be that they simply aren't being recorded due to design decisions that Latif has brought up before as being sub-optimal
• [11:31] Which Linden: Yeah excel is too magic
• [11:31] Which Linden: Also excel is limited to 65,536 rows
• [11:31] Enkidu Linden: not to be snarky but xls is not a very good format for transporting data from point a to point b
• [11:32] Latif Khalifa: yeah, object pays does not tell which object payed
• [11:32] Latif Khalifa: a bummer really if you are wondering which of your objects is taking money ;)
• [11:32] lonetorus Habilis: yeah i found out about the row max, when i tried opening unique visitor list last week for the same sim
• [11:32] lonetorus Habilis: XD
• [11:34] Enkidu Linden: i think we talked about the object pays issue last week, didn't we?
• [11:34] Latif Khalifa: have you switched to git internally at LL?
• [11:34] Latif Khalifa: ID Prefix is very git like lol
• [11:34] Which Linden: Mercurial, and it's in progress
• [11:35] Latif Khalifa: ah
• [11:35] Which Linden: Yeah that was actually the inspiration -- mercurial does the same thing
• [11:35] Latif Khalifa: hehe, i could have smelled it ;)
• [11:35] Which Linden: "4 bytes of uniqueness should be enough for anybody!"
• [11:36] Which Linden: Enkidu did some birthday math on how likely it was that you'd see a colliding id prefix in your transaction history, and it was pretty unlikely
• [11:36] Latif Khalifa: did you take 4 least significant bytes? some crypto experts think that's where most randomness is
• [11:36] Latif Khalifa:  ;)
• [11:36] Enkidu Linden: has the prefix stuff been working out ok for everyone?
• [11:36] Enkidu Linden: i guess it's only been like a day
• [11:37] Which Linden: We move on internet time here! That's like 18 internet years!
• [11:37] Enkidu Linden: VICTORY
• [11:37] Latif Khalifa: i have not had a customer encounter since the new system, but i was ok even with the full uuids
• [11:37] Youri Ashton: dont ask me, i came in late :p
• [11:39] Enkidu Linden: i'll ask again next week
• [11:39] Latif Khalifa: cool
• [11:40] Youri Ashton: dont know what the question was in the first place, wasnt on SL last week :p
• [11:40] Which Linden: Youri: the format of the transactions history page
• [11:41] Which Linden: the HTML
• [11:41] Which Linden: the whites
• [11:41] Enkidu Linden: particularly how transaction uuids are displayed on that page
• [11:41] Arawn Spitteler: Has anyone working on that taken courses in Accounting?
• [11:41] Which Linden: Not me!
• [11:41] Youri Ashton: have a link for that perhaps?
• [11:41] Enkidu Linden: i don't think so, arawn
• [11:41] Enkidu Linden: it shows, doesn't it
• [11:41] Which Linden: https://secure-web2.secondlife.com/my/account/transactions.php
• [11:41] Youri Ashton: bills and me dont go together arawn :p
• [11:42] Which Linden: Yes it shows in that we are not boring. :-P
• [11:42] Youri Ashton: tnx which
• [11:42] Moon Metty: i want to be a lion-tamer ...
• [11:42] Moon Metty: :D
• [11:42] Moon Metty: accounting is so dull
• [11:42] Enkidu Linden: arawn, did you have a complaint or suggestion about the format?
• [11:42] Arawn Spitteler: After you've bloodied your nose a bit, is probably a good time, to sit with accountants, and discuss how data security is traditionally done. Check Kiting Checks and that stuff. The Sumerians used to put clay wrappers around some documents.
• [11:42] Which Linden: I think if I were being honest I would admit that accounting can be interesting to the sort of person who is into that sort of thing, and is therefore a specialized field
• [11:43] Arawn Spitteler: History of Accounting will be more exciting, after working on this stuff
• [11:43] Which Linden: Yeah I totally agree that we should get some accountants to look at our entire transactions infrastructure
• [11:43] Enkidu Linden: that's because the sumerians were awesome
• [11:44] Youri Ashton: interresting page
• [11:44] Youri Ashton: can see pretty much everything
• [11:44] Which Linden: Has anyone ever gone as a Sumerian for Halloween? Is that the best Halloween costume ever, or best costume of all time period?
• [11:45] Latif Khalifa: i import data into my own db anyway, don't use the transaction page much
• [11:45] Moon Metty: hehe
• [11:45] Latif Khalifa: lol
• [11:45] Youri Ashton: no, each year i am on guildwars for halloween
• [11:45] Which Linden: I nearly did that this year with borderlands
• [11:45] Arawn Spitteler: Wearing a large Skirt? I was wearing more Minoan, doing my Sumerian Build for Burning Life.
• [11:45] Which Linden: Latif: yeah I get the sense that most power users just download transaction history
• [11:46] Moon Metty: yes
• [11:46] Which Linden: We don't need no stinkin html
• [11:46] Which Linden: I do feel sorry for anyone who was trying to scrape the html
• [11:46] Enkidu Linden: i hope they used beautifulsoup!
• [11:46] Which Linden: But hopefully no one decides to embark on a project that involves scraping HTML in this day and age.
• [11:47] Arawn Spitteler: Scraping or Scrapping?
• [11:47] Enkidu Linden: doot de doo
• [11:48] Which Linden: Heh heh
• [11:48] Enkidu Linden: a couple of us are scraping fantasy football data from yahoo
• [11:48] Youri Ashton: football? iew
• [11:49] Youri Ashton: lol
• [11:49] Which Linden: Yahoo totally needs an API for that -- don't they know it's Serious Business?
• [11:49] Enkidu Linden: that's what i'm saying
• [11:49] Which Linden: Men have been killed for less
• [11:49] Youri Ashton: finnally have the ball only to kick it away again :p
• [11:49] Latif Khalifa: lol
• [11:49] Arawn Spitteler: Is Youri in England?
• [11:49] Youri Ashton: nope
• [11:50] Youri Ashton: Dutch
• [11:50] Latif Khalifa: i actually have my vendors email my syystem, where it gets enetered into database
• [11:51] Arawn Spitteler: Is it a technical term, to Scrape HTML?
• [11:51] Which Linden: Oh that's nice Latif -- do you encounter discrepancies where one system fails but the other succeeds?
• [11:52] Which Linden: Arawn, I think it's a colloquialism
• [11:52] Latif Khalifa: i actually find email to be the most reliable :)
• [11:52] Arawn Spitteler: Jargon, we have different languages evolving in different areas.
• [11:52] Latif Khalifa: smtp has built in retry on failure ;)
• [11:52] Which Linden: Well, I find UUCP to be more reliable, so there!
• [11:52] Latif Khalifa: haha
• [11:53] Latif Khalifa: well outgoing email is pretty reliable since it scales well
• [11:53] Latif Khalifa: every sim sends its own email
• [11:53] Which Linden: That's a good point about retry on failure though, and about the scalability
• [11:53] Latif Khalifa: incoming email is another story entirely ;)
• [11:53] Youri Ashton: hey tegg, no more robo skippy?
• [11:53] Which Linden: Yeah that is problematic
• [11:54] lonetorus Habilis: Which i scrape data
• [11:54] lonetorus Habilis: my linden balance
• [11:54] Latif Khalifa: outgoing will retry delivery for 4 days
• [11:54] Latif Khalifa: which is nice :D
• [11:54] lonetorus Habilis: it was pretty horrific to pinpoint
• [11:54] Tegg Bode: LOL, I have many skippy forms
• [11:54] Youri Ashton: :p
• [11:54] Moon Metty: wow 4 days
• [11:54] lonetorus Habilis: and to get around the cross site scriprting tokens
• [11:54] lonetorus Habilis: is there a easy way of getting my linden balance?
• [11:54] Latif Khalifa: Moon, most smtp servers try to deliver email for 4 days before giving up
• [11:55] Moon Metty: did you ever notice long delays?
• [11:55] Latif Khalifa: not for outging email, no
• [11:55] Moon Metty: ok
• [11:55] Enkidu Linden: where are you getting it from now, lonetorus?
• [11:55] Which Linden: Ione: I don't think there's an easy way
• [11:55] Latif Khalifa: i usually get a db entry withing 3 seconds from when my vendor recieves the payment :)
• [11:56] Techwolf Lupindo: I had an AR report rejected by the mail server. I learded a lot how the AR process works, ever wonder what happend after you press "ok"?
• [11:56] lonetorus Habilis: im getting it from my account summary, was much easier than getting it from that side info box
• [11:56] Moon Metty: and what's the worst case, Latif?
• [11:56] Latif Khalifa: hm, 20-30 seconds most for outgoing
• [11:56] Latif Khalifa: but LSL kills script for 20 seconds after sending email
• [11:57] Youri Ashton: well, lately Harry Linden been on a rampage, thats what i know. seems innocent people getting perm banned now. already talked to cyn about it, but no word yet
• [11:57] Latif Khalifa: so if someone buys 3 items in a row, the vendor annot deliver more than one every 20 seconds or so
• [11:57] Moon Metty: yes, or you need extra scripts
• [11:57] Which Linden: How much do outgoing http requests cause LSL to sleep?
• [11:58] Latif Khalifa: and i did't want to add 5 parallel delivery scripts to each vendor
• [11:58] Techwolf Lupindo: That where you create about 20 scripts and communcate to them using a orded list in the main one.
• [11:58] lonetorus Habilis: 20 http requests per min
• [11:58] Enkidu Linden: lonetorus: you need to deal with a csrf token on the account summary page?
• [11:58] lonetorus Habilis: with burstable up to 25 iirc
• [11:58] Latif Khalifa: Which 20 seconds penalty for email, no penalty for http,. but there is a throttle
• [11:58] Which Linden: Hm yeah it seems that switching to HTTP with retry logic would be bettr than 20 scripts (from where I sit, which admittedly is not where you sit)
• [11:59] lonetorus Habilis: enkidu, yes i do, as i need to log in, and its a secret feild on the login form, so first i get the login form, save the token, and store my cookies, then fire up a 2nd curl session submitting my login details, then follow the redirect to account summary
• [11:59] Latif Khalifa: luckily SL is so laggy, so people buying two things and waiting 20 seconds just think its another sim freeze so i didn't bother
• [11:59] Which Linden: Latif: see, we're working on your behalf here! :-)
• [12:00] Moon Metty: lol
• [12:00] Latif Khalifa: hahaha
• [12:00] Which Linden: files that under "customer satisfied"
• [12:00] Moon Metty: yesterday we made a plan to charge every avatar who enters the sim 1L$ per freeze-second
• [12:00] Latif Khalifa: making a queue for reliable http with retry would be a major undertaking in lsls
• [12:00] Latif Khalifa: lsl
• [12:00] Moon Metty: so if you cause a 30 second freeze, you have to pay 30 L$
• [12:01] lonetorus Habilis: luls, by land pass?
• [12:01] Enkidu Linden: ok, that makes sense
• [12:01] Moon Metty: you could earn 84k per day that way
• [12:01] Latif Khalifa: lol
• [12:01] Moon Metty: lol
• [12:02] Which Linden: Someone should write a reliable http queue in LSL and release it as open source
• [12:02] Arawn Spitteler: 24X3600? When would anybody ever move?
• [12:02] Latif Khalifa: reliable and lsl in one sentence?
• [12:02] Which Linden: "reliable"
• [12:02] Moon Metty: yes Laitif, the R in LSL stands for reliable
• [12:02] lonetorus Habilis: lol
• [12:02] Latif Khalifa: hahaha
• [12:03] Which Linden: lol
• [12:03] Latif Khalifa: i understand LL does not want llEmail to be used as the source of spam
• [12:03] lonetorus Habilis: ian linden wondered about that at that game con in 2007
• [12:04] Which Linden: I believe that it occasionally still is even with the mad throttling
• [12:04] lonetorus Habilis: ...why noone had used sl as a spam host
• [12:04] Latif Khalifa: but would be nice to have "trusted customer" or something that would avoid those silly 20 sec penalties
• [12:04] Which Linden: Hm yeah --- people could get low scores or something
• [12:04] lonetorus Habilis: latif, well, make it part of the solution provider program ;)
• [12:04] Which Linden: But -- IMO it'd be better to make HTTP easier to make reliable
• [12:05] Youri Ashton: well, redusing spam from sl and xstreet should be handles on a new page, where you can say yes or no to pretty much anything that can get in
• [12:05] lonetorus Habilis: or shortewr delay for premium accounts
• [12:05] Latif Khalifa: which, with memory limits and stuff, its difficult to trust lsl queue not overflowing....
• [12:05] lonetorus Habilis: make premium interesting to ppl again
• [12:05] Which Linden: Definitely agreed
• [12:05] lonetorus Habilis: or even just payment info used
• [12:05] Youri Ashton: basic idea, may take some time but it will save a lot of spam
• [12:06] Which Linden: Friends, it is noon here, and therefore lunch time.
• [12:06] Arawn Spitteler: Secret Spam Host? Just have a bot wear lots of spamming prims, as it passeds from Sim to Sim, and each prim will be removed from the data base, so many days after it's rekeyed on sim crossing.
• [12:06] Latif Khalifa: have good one Which, take care
• [12:06] Youri Ashton: lol, have a good lunch
• [12:06] Moon Metty: bon apetit Which
• [12:06] Youri Ashton: tc and thanks for having us
• [12:07] Which Linden: Thanks for a rollicking discussion. :-)
• [12:07] Arawn Spitteler: At least eat something
• [12:07] Latif Khalifa: Enkidu, transaction history is made of awesome now, good work, make the page load fast and I will start a fan club :D
• [12:07] Which Linden: See you soon!
• [12:07] Moon Metty:  :)