Thursday, September 4, 2008

Where's My Mono? They Promised Me Mono!

Written 4 September, 2008

Where’s My Mono? They Promised Me Mono!

A couple of weeks ago the Linden blog announced Mono would be arriving within days on the main grid in a new server deploy. After the server update, a new Release Candidate would arrive, giving view-side ability to compile scripts into Mono.

Mono, by the way, is a new scripting platform which promises a dramatic increase in script speed and a corresponding reduction of server resources. Faster running time isn’t, apparently, always the case, but if scripts are recompiled into Mono, most scripts should run considerably faster.

How much faster? Well, Whimsy has been averaging about .15 ms total running time; about .13 of this is script time. If Mono should lead to say, a 50% decrease in server resources needed for scripts, the load on Whimsy’s server should decrease by about 45%. Woo hoo!

As of last night, Whimsy was running the new server deploy. Whimsy Kaboom, apparently, isn’t, although it was the first to get the new server software. This means, I suspect, a rollback of the server software, since Kaboom was the first of our sims to get updated.

I’m not sure that’s what happened, because I don’t subscribe to the grid status RSS feeds.

I miss the grid updates on the blog. They were irritating in their frequency sometimes (“There is a problem with the asset server system. Do not engage in financial transactions or rez no-copy objects. “Resolved: Asset server problems.” “The previous post was premature. We continue to have asset server problems.”), but they at least gave me a reason to look at the blog. Nowadays the blog just sits there. There’s rarely a new post.

Sweetie has a Macintosh and downloaded new Release Candidate software. I use (for reasons I don’t quite understand) a PC, and so far no new RC. So even though Whimsy has Mono, I don’t and can’t begin to recompile scripts. Grrr.

Where’s my Mono? They promised me Mono.

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