Dnate Mars

No, they are right. It was the providers fault for the massive downtime on Friday/Saturday. Now, we just have to wait while they explain the rest of the last month.

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Sonja Aeghin

Well, I'll stand corrected. I'd like to see their explanation for the rest of last month...

Ann Launay

My ticket was in reference to today's restrictions. I reopened it.

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Cocoanut Koala

Right, Ann.

While it was nice of the Linden to answer you, the issue is not what happened with their service provider, but this plan to take away essential services whenever there are too many people on the grid.

coco

In other words, their "contingency plan for high loads on [their] servers" is COMPLETELY UNACCEPTABLE.

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reeneebob Birmingham

You know, I have never been happier that I never went back to premium.

I have payment info on file, I have a job, I buy lindens on a fairly regular basis and I shop ALOT. However, while the changes during peak time don't really affect me too much, I am horrified on behalf of the business owner. Any thought of me possibly opening a business in SL is long gone, because I simply do not have any confidence in LL anymore. And they have the nerve to do this but still expect full tier/membership fees from Premium members and those members are getting not even half the function they should for that kind of money. I know of no other business that scales back service while maintaining or raising fees.

I am thisclose to deleting my info, and never logging in again. It's unacceptable.

Naoki Ninetails

To be honest, if I weren't so afraid of SLX and OnRez rejecting all of my purchases again (thanks, Risk API), I would cancel my premium subscription, too. That's the only reason I have it... if there's a way around that, I would love to hear it. -_-; Because I'm certainly getting nothing else out of the $10 a month.

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NeoBokrug Elytis

Actually I am a business person in SL, I run several in fact. The Wastelands (9 sims going on 10), and a Development company. Prior to my own Development company I was a contractor for the sheep. I worked on I am Legend uphill both ways in the grid crashes. I know how utterly frustrating it is to not be able to use the grid, especially when you have deadlines. However, for all the time I have been on today, I have had no problems.

To be honest, I have a little thing that shows me sim performace (not CTRL-ALT-SHIFT-1) overall, and if I load up a group memberlist, I can actually see the sim take the hit as it loads. I'll explain my theory here in a minute.

I remember a while back one of my friends had a friends list in the several thousands of people. Then one day they just couldn't log on. After several help tickets and phone calls, it was determined that the sheer length of their friends list was preventing them from logging on and then timing out. He killed most of his list when he could log on, and bam, SL worked. I suspect this has to do with when a sim slows down whenever an avatar teleports there, or crosses a sim line.

What I gather from friends lists is that they "ping" a user internally on the grid to see if they're on. People are constantly logging in and out, probably more often crashing, then logging back in. Every time this happens there's some data crunching as to who is online in your friends list, then notifying all your friends that you're online, etc.

I suspect the same tech is used for groups, except I've seen groups run into the thousands of members on a regular basis. With all of that group data flowing between sims, slowing stuff down, I honestly believe this is a step in the right direction to fixing the problem.

Another theory I have is that since Phillip asked congress to step in on the DOS attacks the grid has been seeing, that this is somehow involved in the DOS attacks. Shut down the service and then no more DOS attacks.

I know I bitch about the lindens on occasion, only because they seem like they're doing nothing, but I think we all need to give them some credit on identifying an issue, and sacrificing group lists, and profiles so the grid is operable. Which it has been for me.

If you guys are experiencing problems, cull down your friends list. Why do you think a noob alt seems so much better? None of that overhead.

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Ann Launay

You know, if there's a truly valid reason for this step, they need to communicate it with the user base, in plain English, rather than just leaving us all in a state of "wtf?". The Residents reactions would likely be far more tolerant.

Bams

I don't think the point is that we are all upset that the performance will increase, if that happens so be it, but as a business owner I think we are all concerned about how we will be able to keep in touch with our existing clients if this stuff becomes an ongoing problem.

I use my groups notice function to update my group on new products and services being offered.
And without the ability to seach out someone's profile and contact them, it makes finding the person you need to contact almost, if not entirely impossible unless that person is on their contact list (I like to keep mine short, for reasons mentioned above).

Not sure what the issue is, but without the ability to stay in touch with clients, many business owners will feel the impact and throttle back or even discontinue their efforts, which will mean reduced content for grid users and I think from here we can all follow the logic.

Hopefully the changes made to the setup will bring better performance. At least that's what the blog implies without specifically telling us what those changes might have been or how it stands to impact us.

(fingers crossed)

Malachi

ISPs have problems; if nothing else there is always the proverbial backhoe to ruin a connection.

However if you are selling a network service and if you care about uptime and if you are willing or able to pay for it then you get redundant connections that don't share a single point of failure. If you don't have any reason to really care about reliability, you can always do things the way LL does.

Note that the internet was designed from the start to allow connectivity to continue in the event of arbitrary intermediate node failures. That they can't get the hang of 40 year old telecommunications protocols is not the fault of their ISP; it is LL's failure in comms specification and purchase.

Sonja Aeghin

Amen. I use mine for letting my VIPs and staff know about upcoming events and so on as a club manager. It sucks when you can't get in touch with your clients.

Bams

I hadn't looked at it like that but you're completely correct. Let's hang em from a yardarm... xD

Sofia Westwick

If you remember just 3 or so days ago they did the same thing for "30" minutes calling it a test.
but it was actually alot longer then 30 minutes. for the next 2 hours after the "test" was supposedly done i couldn't load profiles even after reloging and clearing "group cache and network cache"

[FINISHED] Thirty Minutes of Load Testing Today at 1:30 p.m. Pacific « Official Second Life Blog

disabling profiles and so on.

Naoki Ninetails

Hmm. Re: friends list length keeping things clean...

I'd always kept my list very brief just for the sake of quietude, but now I at least have a very good reason for rejecting unwanted friend adds. ;3 Thanks for that.

Sonja Aeghin

so, so true.

NeoBokrug Elytis

No problem! I normally do the same thing.

Jezebella

In LL's long history of boneheaded moves, this has got to be the most idiotic of them all. Does Amazon.com or Ebay deactivate key parts of the service to deal with peak time demand? Hell no, they add more hardware to handle the volume. When is LL going to grow up and start acting like a real business with real customers?

Sonja Aeghin

Agreed. Otherwise you get IMs from people you don't even remember and so you go wondering who in the grid is THAT?

Jimmy Morane

I know you are mad, Coco, but I just LMAO at this line. As for what you said in your post script - it is people like you who are engaged in commerce and building that make sl what it is. Without folks like you and all the others, sl would be an empty, lonely world. I don't think LL is really trying to force the resident business folk out of sl. If they are, then they really need to rethink the strategy.

Dnate Mars

If it really was that easy life would be good. There are fundamental flaws in the system they designed. Those need to be fix to correct the issues.

Ann Launay

Is it just me, or does this second response say even more nothing than the first one?

Wildefire Walcott

Oh I'm sure they made these decisions because they knew where the load was; they are a smart bunch of people. (Actually, though, I've heard that the map system is the #1 system burden though... but I guess SL would pretty much be useless without it.) The thing is, they seem to be implying that these things are an issue when the grid is too crowded. When you've got business owners, land owners, and other SL residents who pay a fair amount of RL cash into the system, it would seem that queuing- something that many other online games to- would be one's first solution, rather than degrading the performance for everyone who manages to log on.

They have been dealing with hardcore growing pains since 2006. A few months- even a year of shitty performance while they retool things to make the system scalable, would have been understandable. But 2 years and counting?

I am familiar with this issue, and judging by a recent official blog post I am convinced the Lindens finally understand this as well. I do really hope they figure out a way for more of their global residents to get "on file."

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Hiro Queso

Is it the generation of the map that is the problem? If so, I say dump all but the very basics. I loved the map when SL was smaller, being able to see the 'big picture' zoomed out, but at it's current size, and with only being able to see features when zoomed in, I think it's now near redundant.

Cocoanut Koala

My friends list is already culled.

I'm talking about people not able to ACCESS PROFILES.

A grid with sacrificed profiles is plain old NOT OPERABLE for the purposes of being a business owner (or one of their customers, with a problem).

If the answer to the overloading problem is to PREVENT MY CUSTOMERS FROM REACHING ME, and vice versa, then that is simply and totally unacceptable.

After all, it's not like there is no other possible solution. The Lindens themselves came up with the solution last year of throttling log-ins when necessary, going from premium down to no-payment-on-file.

Yet, they are not doing that. (Not to mention any other solutions I may not have thought of.)

Why aren't they doing that?


I'll tell you why: Because they want everyone to be able to get on, whether they pay a penny for it or not, INCLUDING ALL BOTS.

And I believe several people have said a solution might be at hand with more servers and bandwidth. So far, nobody has told me any different when I have asked for clarification for that.

Not only is this "solution" unacceptable, but it doesn't even matter in the long run, does it?

They are making a very clear statement that letting in everyone and all bots at all times is more important than the services which allow us to run our businesses.

So you can be understanding all you like, but I hope part of what you are understanding is that business owners and their customers have gotten the shaft here, and we're all supposed to put up with it so that anyone can always log on at any time.

Including hordes of bots.

As I've said before, there is basically only one thing that causes me to tier down: Having my business wrecked. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that if business owners (and their customers) are going to be hobbled in this way, BUSINESS OWNERS WILL LEAVE.

The thing is, the message from LL seems clear: Business owners, don't let the door hit your butts on your way out.

coco

Atashi Yue

Thing is, LL has known that groups were a problem for a long time and they have yet to fix it.