[sldev] Question: Replacing current group chat with XMPP?

[David M Chess]

Another set of agglomerated replies.  :)

From: Argent Stonecutter <secret.argent at gmail.com>
...
>On 2008-09-10, at 11:18, Tateru Nino wrote:
>> It's my understanding that 5 seconds group IM latency is routinely
>> exceeded in practice.
>
>In fact when it's dropping messages it can take a couple of minutes 
>for it to come back and tell you it can't send the message.

Very true, but I take it that this is a problem we'd rather not reproduce, 
rather than something that we want to make sure that an intragrid Group IM 
system also does.  :)

(Although note that there's a difference between typical message-delivery 
latency and worst-case or typical-case time for failure detection; we 
should think of them both, with awareness of the difference.)

>I think the assumption that most people are in 25 groups is probably 
>wrong. The only reason I'm in 25 groups is because I'm in land groups 
>for vendors.

It would be interesting to see statistics on that.  Given the number and 
volume of the voices I hear raised asking for the limit to be increased, I 
think it's pretty common for people to be in 25 groups, for whatever 
reason.  Not necessarily 25 groups that really need a group chat channel, 
though.

>I think the assumption that most groups people are in have active 
>chat is probably wrong. None of those land groups have active chat.

I'm not assuming that most groups that people are in have active chat, 
either always or even ever.  I'm guessing that if we (a) raise the 
25-group limit, and (b) differentiate the groups that need a chat channel 
from those that don't, the result will be that people belong to more 
chat-using groups than they do now, but likely not as many as 25.

>In a typical several-hour session, I will get chat from maybe three 
>or four groups. For all but a couple of my groups I would prefer that 
>there not be a group chat at all, because almost the only time there 
>is traffic on the group is when a group notice goes out, and I 
>immediately quit that group's chat. The only reason I keep listening 
>for chat is because sometimes the group owner sends a notice in group 
>chat instead of a notice.

Yep, again I think it will be very useful to, if we can, find out more 
about current group-chat behavior than we already know.  I pretty much 
never quit group chats myself; I might miss something interesting!  And 
yes, that means that I'm constantly scrolling my group-chat window left 
and right to see all the tabs, and I hate that.  :)

> But while I would guess that maybe only a couple of percent of logged 
> in residents would be in more than 3 or 4 active chat groups at once, 
> we really need actual statistics from Linden Labs to see whose model 
> is closer to reality.

Agreed.  And we also need to differentiate between "active chat groups" in 
the sense of "chat going on right now", and "active chat groups" in the 
sense of "have a chat channel that is used reasonably often, even if not 
necessarily right now".  When we do scaling analysis, we'll need both 
numbers.  (For instance, if you're polling it's the latter number that 
matters most, whereas if you're pushing the former is generally more 
important.)

From: Ambrosia <chaosstar at gmail.com>

>I don't see an issue there. There are zero problems with being logged
>into 25 IRC channels at one time.

Ah, good data!  I went back to look at the office hours in question (
https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/User:Zero_Linden/Office_Hours/2008_September_04
), and it looks like I've been mistaken (blush).  Zero was talking about 
XMPP, not IRC.  Ooops!  :)  We should drag Zero and Zha into this, and see 
if they're aware of any suspected limitations in IRC.

From: Soft <soft at lindenlab.com>

>At this point, a wiki design doc would be more productive than much of
>this thread.

There is a strawman design at "
https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/User:Dale_Innis/Group_IM_in_OGP#A_Simple_Design_Example
".  /me begs for comments and contributions there (or elsewhere, with a 
link from there) yet again.

Dale Innis
DaleInnisEmail at gmail.com
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