Frank Ambrose updates on Second Life stability
by Tateru Nino 
Dec 5th 2008 at 1:30PM
Filed under: News items, Second Life, Virtual worlds
Linden Lab's Frank Ambrose (FJ Linden) has issued another update on ongoing efforts to improve on the issues that have been a thorn in the side of Second Life users for some time. Ambrose points to the last four weeks as "a good stretch of grid stability" and implying that the only serious problems were confined to an approximately three hour period during the middle of the month.
This leaves us wondering whether he's talking about the same grid that we're familiar with, or if perhaps there's not some new definition of stability that we might have missed the press release for. The last four weeks has seen no less than 20 unplanned stability issues reported on the grid's status blog, and a number that went unreported there. That's not even counting the failed rollout of SLS1.25 simulator code, which caused additional difficulties -- or issues with ancillary services.
That said, January is supposed to see the rollout of the new inventory service, which should alleviate problems with one kind of inventory loss, and improve inventory transactional integrity. Additionally there are two other projects which are moving away from Linden Lab's dependence on VPN servers, which are responsible for a great deal of the network and inter-simulator communications problems that cause disruptions on a more or less weekly basis.
Ambrose promises more information on all of these, as well as additional information in approximately one month.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Jacek Antonelli said on 1:58PM 12-05-2008
I think by "grid stability", they mean they slipped a brochure for Immersive Workspaces under the leg of that old table in the garage that the asset server sits on. Now it doesn't wobble and creak every time someone plays the "Hoooo!" gesture.
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Moe Greene said on 2:02PM 12-05-2008
I'm confused. For a couple days in the last week my welcome message was something to the effect of, "Hey, check your lost and found folder for missing items because we just recovered a bunch of them." That does not leave anyone with a good feeling about stability.
I don't have the stats to back it up but it does seem to me as if the grid had been mostly stable for several months and is now slipping back into unstable mode.
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Doubledown Tandino said on 4:06PM 12-05-2008
This is funny, it reminds me of a few months ago when John Mccain stated "the fundimentals of the ecomony are strong" while the worldwde banking systems and stock markets were crashing all around us.
At this point, I think LL should just shut-up... like, always...all the time.. especially when they're talking about Second Life.
When i need my news about the stability of our SL nation, I'll listen to the residents.
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Skate Foss said on 8:16PM 12-05-2008
HaHa, last Monday took over 15 minutes to log in. I watched the 'online now' numbers drop and drop while the Grid Status page stated 'Earlier Log In' problems 'Resolved'. I contacted Live IM help, the LL employee nicely stated maybe things were not quite resolved yet. Maybe the people at Linden Labs should proof the press releases, before sending them out to us to question who's drinking the KoolAid.
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Gwyneth Llewelyn said on 9:01PM 12-15-2008
Well, for the sake of the argument, just remember that LL's claims on grid stability also comes from the massive amount of data and statistics on SL client crashes. And those are actually improving — only residents that have problems are vocal about it, nobody posts blog articles saying "hooray, another day has passed, and my SL client hasn't crashed a single time!".
Tateru, btw, do you have any news on what exactly the 1.25 is bringing to make it so hard to deploy? Is it just a communications infrastructure change (to HTTP I presume?) or something else? I mean, the deployment of 1.25 has been attempted so many times, with 2-3 weeks elapsing between each attempt, that I completely forgot what it was all about... all I know is what's on the wiki release notes, e.g. "Featurettes Batch #2 -- server-side support for many small changes and fixes to the viewer" (nothing major): http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Release_Notes/Second_Life_Beta_Server/1.25
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