Chat failing to initiate
needs info
Tinker Pixels
Both group chat and IM failing to initiate. I mostly experience it in Firestorm Social Island (simhost-0be97bd680c67540a.agni), as do the rest of the team.
Starting an IM with someone else will work most of the time and every once in a while end up with a popup stating "Unable to start a new chat session with Username. The session initialization is timed out".
Group chats will either fail silently or give the following message inline:
"Second Life: You are the only participant in this IM session. Your message is not being broadcast at this ti2me."
Tested on Second Life Release 26.1.1.23806384790, Alchemy Beta 7.1.9.2516 and Firestorm 7.2.3.80036.
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Maestro Linden
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kevinhramsey Resident
I'm having this same issue. I'll receive an IM and about 30 seconds later I get the "Unable to start a new chat session with Username. The session initialization is timed out" popup and the IM window closes. When I reopen the IM window I'm unable to send a message. I can click send, but after clicking Send nothing happens. The message just disappears.
Maestro Linden
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Sparkle Weatherwax
I think 'failure to initiate' is pretty specific but, more information; this went on for a few hours early in the morning. Cleared up for awhile after around 10:AM SLT and recurred late last night so it's intermittent which is troublesome to actually pin down for documentation. Fact is, it did affect several avatars who commented to me about it. These were mostly older avis, helpers, etc who spend a lot of time in SL. So it wasn't just an isolated glitch. Hope this helps.
Maestro Linden
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Maestro Linden
Hi Tinker Pixels in order to investigate this, we'll need more details about specific incidents. For each incident, we need these details:
- Exact timestamp of the incident
- Name of the region you were in for that incident
- Name of the avatar (or group) you were messaging
- The viewer logs from that session.
For the viewer log, please Reproduce the viewer issue, log out, and then zip up your viewer logs folder. This page tells you where to find the logs folder: https://community.secondlife.com/knowledgebase/english/how-to-report-a-bug-r224/
Next, email the zip file to bug-attachments@lindenlab.com and reference the issue name in the email subject line.
Leave a comment on this canny issue once that's done so we can take a look at the logs.
Tinker Pixels
Maestro Linden
Exact time stamp: 8:43:01.
Exact region: Firestorm Social Island
Avatar that got the message: GatewayTester (secondlife:///app/agent/75c98507-b637-45c1-b94e-044813dfb9a8/about)
Avatar that I was messaging: Esmin (secondlife:///app/agent/5bae2768-ebee-44d4-a4c7-71c5c6a2ee98/about)
Viewer logs was sent as instructed.
Maestro Linden
Tinker Pixels: Thanks. I do see the line you're talking about in the viewer log:
2026-04-08T15:42:36Z WARNING # newview/lltoastalertpanel.cpp(197) LLToastAlertPanel::LLToastAlertPanel : Alert: Unable to start a new chat session with Esmin.
The session initialization is timed out
I'm not immediately seeing any activity from your avatar in the sim right around that time. Were you trying to send an IM to Esmin right when you got that notification, or did it seem to appear on its own?
Tinker Pixels
Maestro Linden In this case he had written me first, as I went to respond I got that while typing and the tab force-closed.
Tinker Pixels
Maestro Linden And important detail, This was done on the avatar GatewayTester (secondlife:///app/agent/75c98507-b637-45c1-b94e-044813dfb9a8/about) - not mine.
Maestro Linden
Tinker Pixels: Okay, looking through the viewer codebase and also that of Alchemy, it looks like that particular error message is a timeout error message that triggers if the client requests a chat session and doesn't hear a response from the server time. Starting a chat session against a single avatar (as opposed to a group or conference) would generally only happen if starting a P2P call with them over webRTC Voice. So it's curious that the viewer is complaining about a failed chat session with Esmin if you hadn't been trying to call them.
Tinker Pixels
Maestro Linden Earlier today (the first report) was on Firestorm. At no point in time has voice call been involved in the flow.
Tinker Pixels
Maestro Linden
Group chat initialisation failed. This time using Firestorm 7.2.4.80458.
Viewer logs not sent on email since FS logs were 163 MB.
Location: FaMESHed X located at simhost-0ae6f7674fd4b8d20.agni
From: The Shopping Club (Group) secondlife:///app/group/33127b5e-71e6-8d60-f1fa-bf3c5e4c4bbd/about
To: Me (secondlife:///app/agent/02bb4e65-ad55-4c3f-9885-c4f26f012a5a/about)
Timestamp: Message was sent 01:00:29 to group by Piper Atheria (secondlife:///app/agent/3131fa6b-5dca-429e-80bd-fbc537ae6104/about)
Tinker Pixels
Maestro Linden
A bit different this time. I received an IM. And a little while after (perhaps 30 seconds) I got the error message and the chat tab force-closed.
Exact timestamp: 2026/04/13 07:36:29
Name of region: Libera (simhost-0165b852b92e47d11.agni)
Name of Avatar: Katherine Owens (secondlife:///app/agent/e161ac64-cb60-4b77-aded-79aa7666fec0/about)
Logfiles: Cannot be shared. Firestorm logs in %appdata% are 162 MB at this time. If you want me to cherry pick (or share the full file via other means than email, please advise).
Maestro Linden
Tinker Pixels: I think the only file that's really helpful in this case would be Firestorm.log itself. If the whole file is too big, I think something like the output of
grep -C 5000 [timestamp of incident] Firestorm.log
would give us enough logging context. Firestorm on linux produces UTC-zone timestamps such as 2026-04-10T18:45:35Z
.Tinker Pixels
Maestro Linden I have sent firestorm.log over :-)
Maestro Linden
Tinker Pixels: I received the logs file email. It appears that the attached Firestorm.log starts at 2026-04-13T15:12:50Z and ends at 2026-04-13T18:05:06Z.
It doesn't look like this log contains the incident at 2026/04/13 07:36:29, which would be 2026-04-13T14:36:29Z in the viewer log - the logs we have unfortunately start about 40 minutes later.
In general, you'll want to capture the Firestorm.log file immediately after hitting the issue and exiting the viewer, as the next viewer session will replace the log file. Another thing to keep in mind is that the time stamps in the log messages are all in UTC timezone, which is currently 7 hours ahead of SLT (during US daylight savings time).
Tinker Pixels
Maestro Linden I understand, but don't know how to get the right files for the previous incident. I will make sure to secure the right log files next time as instructed by Monty.