Where's the server performance improvements? I'ts been more than a year.

[Up4 Dawes]

Well there was a new server side guy that started and I guess according to Rod he was going to adress the issues of performance of the servers it's been more than a year and I'm seeing a measurable decrease in performance and a measurable increase in server problems? my gut feeling is after been a Network Admin for years it's the cloud based, virtual just in time resource allocation that, well dosen't get there in time treating a graphics dependent intensive enviroment like

your serving up excel or web.. pages ain't goona make it..never no way Jose...take the elastic outta your underwear, also I think the bandwidth has been cut down a deadly combination that would only be used if cheapin out on the system and therefore

the user experience..

[Talia Davidov]

People come in here and gripe all the time about how horrible the service has become and how nothing has improved in __ amount of time.  The only reply I have is  . . .are you kidding?   How about getting rid of the dreaded Mono sim pause when avatars arrive?   How about getting rid of the timewarp issue?  How about making some of the most useful changes to LSL that I have seen since starting in SL?  How about having a grid that doesn't go down for days at a time while they try to fix something . .well ok on that one have been a couple of times lately, but it used to be weekly. 

Seriously . .if you have been here any length of time at all you know that this is one area where they really have been working on problems.  Yeah its not perfect yet, and never will be.  That is the nature of the beast.  But the Lindens in charge of server updates are the one group of lindens that will actually communicate with us.  Try going over to the merchant forums and get any meaningful dialog with a linden.

I for one applaud Maestro and Kelly and Oskar (seems like am missing another) and wish more people would take a moment to say thanks for the work they do and encourage them to keep it up.

[Up4 Dawes]

Well thanks for the background and I'm glad at least one department is more responsive,,BUT my question is not of putting out fires but of overall design,infrastructure and finanical resource allocation..I have seen too many times answers that

get lost in bug speak. I think it's only fair since many here pay a lot for the service that we are furnished with the server hardware,configurations and artiticture as many cloud, ISP's and server co-location would furnish even with acounts with

less billable rates...maybe I missed it or didn't dig or research enough to find this, and if not why is it not furnished openly?

[Ayesha Askham]

@Talia

None of us would gripe at Oskar and Maestro, who both do fine, largely thankless jobs, if their colleagues did not give them so many fires to fight.

SL has improved over the four plus years I've been here, but there have never been signs that the platform was maturing into a stable experience.  Too many faults have occurred due to sloppy programming and ineffectual QA.

Rodvik's stated aim of making SL into a stable shared experience will see SL reduced to a bland, gamelike experience, and yet the paltform will never be able to compete with the speed and responsiveness of pre-drawn games that many crave.

Too often fixes that would retain the non-gaming residents have been delayed by less obvious work to "fix" things that to all intents and purposes were not broken.

SL's much vaunted "Your World, Your Imagination" punchline has been a sham for at least half of my time here.  It is one man's World and largely his Imagination.

Yes, some of the platform is better but if SL were truly so much better than it used to be its resident population would not be steadily falling as it so obviously is.

Do not misunderstand me...I love SL, it has provided me with a means of expression that I would never have had otherwise.  But far too often I have felt that my wants and needs were at odds with the people that created this world and that I was almost an unwanted, but needed accessory.

[Lydia Craig]

it is truly sad to see this thing fall apart like it is.  In a couple of days I will have been in SL for six years and for at least the last two have watched it decline steadily under a constant siege of self induced technical problem, and for the last six months watch helplessly as it has gone off the edge of a veritable cliff taking everyone with it.  As for the MONO pause the pause is still there and not it is prolonged into teleport crashes,. thise developed about two months ago at a time when things actually seemed to be getting stable, however, some either made a mistake in engineering and messed up the core servers or more likely intentionally installed some poorly tested code on the core server and set off the present as of yet continuous decline.  This has been accompanied by a second wave of veteran players leaving SL and far fewer new memberships than in the past.  As for myself when my account comes up for renewal I will likely do it for 3 months rather than the normal 12 that I have been renewing for since I started six years ago and if things do not improve by the end of the year may sell my holdings and leave SL entirely, because by then there will be very little left to stay for.

[Talia Davidov]

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Ayesha Askham wrote:

@Talia

Yes, some of the platform is better but if SL were truly so much better than it used to be its resident population would not be steadily falling as it so obviously is.

Do not misunderstand me...I love SL, it has provided me with a means of expression that I would never have had otherwise.  But far too often I have felt that my wants and needs were at odds with the people that created this world and that I was almost an unwanted, but needed accessory.

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@Ayesha

I have to disagree completely.  The platform itself has improved a great deal from just a few years ago.  I do not believe the decline in population can be attributed to the technology.  No its not perfect far from it.  There are many other factors that in my honest opinion have led to falling numbers.  For example, the state of support became absolutely horrid for a time.  It was much better several years ago, then became a laughing stock.  It has improved a little now, but still not what it was a few years ago.  Also the lack of communication from LL.  When is the last time Rodvik spoke anywhere about SL?  Things like these are what drive people away (and yes the disaster that v2 client was).

I have been around in one person or another since near the beginning.  I have never seen the consistent effort to work on the server side that I have seen for the last year or so.  Maybe I was just a noob all that time and didn't notice it.  But for years it seemed to sit stagnant.  Now, I see changes happening all the time in the server group to improve our world.  But what do I see in the forums . . pure hate (not directed at you).  I have said this in another forum, and I say it again here.  Why in the world would the Lindens want to communicate with us when NOTHING they do is met with anything but complaints.  *shrug, think what you want, but I for one am glad the server team is hear working towards bettering our world, they seem to me to be the only lindens that are.

[Ayesha Askham]

Talia, we actually disagree about less than you think.  I did not say that there had been no improvements since the origin of SL, that is plainly true.

The issues I have with the way that SL is being directed are centred around the removal, by stages, of the ability of residents to customise their world.  Yes there have been additions, but there have also been losses, serious ones.

Viewed against Rod's stated intent this is entirely consistent, and in my view, a dreadful diminution of all that SL originally stood for.

Yes, the appalling reputation the support deservedly acquired certainly drove some away, but by and large it was the failure of some basic service that upset most.  Those failures were caused by an inability of the programmers of SL to understand how the platform was being used.  Several times we have heard "Oh well we never intended that to be used in that way, so now it won't be possible, - live with it." That attitude is, more than anything else, the source of the "Us and Them" situation.

Now no-one in their right mind would say that Linden Lab haven't striven to improve SL, it is simply that I wholeheartedly believe that some of the principal "movers and shakers" do not know what the majority of SL residents want, and it seems that some actually do not care what we want.  We will get what they want and like or lump it.

The server team are indeed working towards bettering SL, but only in a way that conforms to a certain policy, the policy of Linden Lab's CEO.

[Nalates Urriah]

What a bizarre thread…

@Ayesha: …the removal, by stages, of the ability of residents to customize their world.

What are you talking about? I came in 4 years ago and I’ve only seen additions to SL. What restriction on customizing the world do you think you see?

@Up4: You are simply uninformed.

 

When Rod Humble came in there were a number of projects in progress. Most of those have been completed now. Mesh being the most prominent. His decision to fix problems is in full swing now. Ask any of the Lindens in the user groups and they are working on fixes and improvements to the system. The ‘infrastructure’ changes they roll out change how the back side of SL works. So, we often don’t see a change.

The recent multi-threaded region crossing code took from February to a week ago to get sorted and roll to the main grid. Phase II of that is in progress. It’s main focus is to remove the lag caused by avatars departing regions.

They have been sorting through the avatar bake fail problems. The recent pre-baked inventory avatars are a step in the fix. That problem we describe with a single term is caused by numerous glitches and causes. A real time system with tens of thousands of users gets complex. It took months to chase down the causes. Hopefully they found them all. Now it is taking moths to figure out how to fix them.

Chasing down the Time Warp issue and finding the cause buried in the Linux server software took about a year. New software was developed to catch and track the problems in the SL system. Only after exhausting everything else did they turn to developing tools to catch a problem in Linux.

Only a few new feature projects are in progress. We know about Pathfinding and Experience Tools.

The system is complex and changes in the foundation often affect seemingly unrelated aspects of SL. For instance: changing the max prim size to 64m created an issue with prims encroaching on adjacent property. Returning such prims became surprising complex to handle without creating new exploits for griefers. An entire new system for handling the permissions to allow one to remove an encroaching prim from their property had to be worked out and implemented.

Other issues were tracked down to being simply a matter of how physically far apart some servers were from others. I find that amazing for servers in the same building running on a fiber optic network.

 

 

[Ayesha Askham]

Nalates

You know very well which changes I mean.  Perhaps if you read MY blog you would understand better.  Yes server-side issues are being solved and the chasing-down of timewarp was a big project.

But....

The priority given to some changes over bugfixes that were crucifying retention of new sign-ups, of which the SVC-7902 bug was just one.... is my point.  It is internal priorities, and frankly if you want SL to be "just another game" then OK.

SL was different, it allowed its users to employ imagination.  Rod has a clear vision for the future of SL, that is undeniable. It just isn't mine or that of a lot of folk like me.  I don't see much sign of Rod being open-minded to the views of others.

The neutering of Third Party viewers was just one step, but while Firestorm is still a fine instrument, the developers are hamstrung by having to wait on the painfully slow LL QA procedure (which has shown itself to be more than a little flawed lately) before any new features can be introduced.

I don't intend to go elsewhere just yet, because SL is still by far the best virtual world, but it is not as far ahead as it used to be, and its competitors listen and learn.  You and I will never agree on some things, Nalates, but that does not invalidate my point.

[Perrie Juran]

First of all, I think that you need to read two things because your post leaves this novice in serious doubt of whether or not you understand how the architecture works Up4 Dawes.

SCALING VIRTUAL WORLDS: SIMULATION REQUIREMENTS AND CHALLENGES

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Service_Disruptions

 

As far as "Your World, Your Imagination," while I still feel that LL could do a better job with orientation I see nothing hindering what people can do.  Policy wise, perhaps the only problem is that in order to grow they are trying to cater to people who are only looking for a game.  People who want someone else to do their thinking for them.

I will agree that some policy decisions have possibly stifled some TPV development.  But the TPV's still continue to evolve.

But after over five years here I still find incredible works of peoples imaginations, some that would have not been possible five years ago.

I can still build and create and with fewer problems than I had five years ago.  The only limits are still my imagination.

Sorry, but I have to disagree strongly with the doom and naysayers.

 

[Sharie Criss]

Yes, there have been a few improvements, but in my nearly 5 years here it's still not enough and the cost of SL is still too high. I can STILL not teleport reliably, where the only way to get out of some (isolated) sims is to logout and re-log to home (the other solution seems to be to fly to a neighboring sim and TP, but frequently there isn't one.) LL talks so much about region crossing issues that they forgot that most people TP from one location to another. Bleh. Frustration after the 10th failed TP attempt to get out of a sim is pretty damn high. It's no wonder people quit. Marketplace is great. It's also nearly killed in-world play sims that rely on malls and donations to exist. The fact is that sims still cost as much as they did years ago despite hardware and bandwidth costs dropping by a factor of 4. I'm still limited to 15K prims for $300 USD / month. That's insane. In this down economy, you can not charge that much for a "luxury" optional service. It drives people away. I've seen all too many places vanish due to cost. KILL the freakin bots already. Yes, bots can be useful in very limited cases, but mostly they are used to artificially inflate land traffic. LL needs to ban that practice and give us better LSL functions to manage group, land, and inventory functions. I should be able to do anything via a script that I could with a bot (or at least the 90% use cases.) LL is so busy making "improvements" that nobody is asking for that they ignore all the requests for things we really need such as TP reliability and LSL functions or things that will keep SL alive such as more affordable land and a better financial incentive to use in-world vendors (higher transaction fees on Marketplace which can subsidize land costs) I know some people will squawk at higher marketplace fees, but low fees are meaningless if nobody is left in SL to buy anything from you. I'm very very seriously considering giving up my land in SL. It simply costs too much and there are fewer and fewer (non-bot) people in SL to play with. It's the worst its ever been. If viewership wasn't declining there would be more praise for LL. Clearly they are not doing something right.

[Ayesha Askham]

Perrie Juran wrote

" As far as "Your World, Your Imagination," while I still feel that LL could do a better job with orientation I see nothing hindering what people can do.  Policy wise, perhaps the only problem is that in order to grow they are trying to cater to people who are only looking for a game. 

People who want someone else to do their thinking for them

."

Sorry Perrie, that is my precise point.

That would leave SL wide open to competition from games that demand less of a user's hardware, and frankly are better sorted.

We saw signs of the scaling issue back in 2009, but other than a concerted effort to drive some users away, I see no real effort on Linden Lab's part to address this until they started work on upgrading the Debenian Linux OS recently.

Rod's idea is to make SL uniform  "predicable and stable".  One of my synonyms for predictable is "boring".

 

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[Up4 Dawes]

Oh then just forget it...I'll come back next year and ask again..thank you