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LL explain recent log-in problems


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In the early days, SL was considered as experimental by LL, but that hasn't been true for many years now. It's the main product of a money-making company and, as such, it is a complete product that they sell, and not experimental. It's just like many other products that continue to be improved but are sold as they stand at any given time. Phones, TVs, PVRs, WoW, etc. - all sold as complete products but continue to be improved.

No. SL is not experimental. Using the word 'experimental' to excuse what happens ran out many years ago. LL can say it's still only in its beta stage, but that doesn't wash. They promote it as a working system, and sell it as such, making plenty of money in the process. It's not experimental.

They may perform experiments with it from time to time, such as when they successfully TPed someone between SL and another grid. If everything about that could have been worked out, then the fruit of that experiment would be part of SL today, but SL as a whole is not an experiment.

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MBeatrix wrote:

I'm sure the original coder never considered that that there would be enough people using SL that it would only take 10 years to run out of identifiers.

Maybe if the Lab had been more concerned about the way things work instead of cheating numbers, that might had never happened. Just look below:

Total Residents:
38,187,152
| Residents online:34,267 | Last update:2014-05-25 04:25:05 SLT

Data from 

 

So, I hope that this last "unpleasantness" has been a good lesson for everyone, starting on the LL directors board and ending at us all, users. As I wrote before, in another thread, after more than a decade Second Life still is an experimental thing and we probably should look at it under that perspective.

MBeatrix,

How in the world do you come up with the statement "Maybe if the Lab had been more concerned about the way things work instead of cheating numbers, that might had never happened. Just look below:" from the statement from Landon of "I'm sure the original coder never considered that that there would be enough people using SL that it would only take 10 years to run out of identifiers"?

Do you really think LL ever cared about region numbers and number of Residents to the exclusion of development tasks?

There has been exactly.....ZERO.....serious contenders in competition in it's User Created Virtual World space over the last 10 years. Blue Mars, while beautiful was never a strong competitor. The same with the OpenGRID.

Developers make decisions all the time that seem logical at the time that end up coming back to nibble on the system in question long after the code was QA'd and released. It's clear that the SL Grid as envisioned by LL was built to handle millions of accounts. That it took this long for millions of account login transitions to run out of the "unique" login hand-off identifiers is testimony to that. That "number" has to be huge. I'm not sure this was a metric that was ever reported or at the time even thought of as being in need of watching. A WAG on my part is over 100,000 logins [mean average] a day for 10 years......equals a really big number.

Had the developer been thinking about uniqueness across time then they should have based this hand-off identifier on any of the classic UUID schemes - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UUID#Random%5FUUID%5Fprobability%5Fof%5Fduplicates

:D

P.S. Here is what I see and walk away with when I see a metric such as

"Total Residents:Total Residents:38,187,152 | Residents online:34,267 "

My Take away: 38,187,152 account registrations since SL was conceived and at the time of this metric capture 34,267 of those accounts were online. That represents about 0.0897 % of the registered accounts are online.

If I was LL I'd be making sure that the server farms can manage the peak concurrent account online load x 2. Nowhere in that stat is a warning to me about running out of one-time login hand-off identifiers.

These stats are boring in reality. How you come up with "cheating" i have yet to fathom.

 

 

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Karen, as I stated earlier in this thread (see page 1) I'm quite pleased with Landon's honesty. And, of course, I exagerated a bit as a figure of speech. No, I'm sure the Lab hasn't been that concerned about numbers in detriment of improving SL overall perfomance over the years. Still, I wonder if there are 38,187,152 user records in the database... and if that somehow doesn't partially contribute to the present issues. The cheating part comes from the Lab showing almost 40 million users, when I never noticed more than 67.000 online, in my two years and an half in SL. Seems obvious to me that such a difference is one more way of "promoting" SL.

Stats are not boring, they show a reality that may be different from what you want to see. But I agree that they can be inconvenient, at times...

About other grids, I can tell you that I run OpenSim offline only. And if I am in SL — paying for it — and not in any other one, there must be a reason... :matte-motes-bashful-cute-2:

--

Phil, I know that SL is promoted and sold as a product, but then I cannot agree that it is a stable one when so many things don't work for us, mere users, how the Lab says in their promotional stuff. I also know that any product is never finished and that Second Life isn't exactly a simple system — it is a quite complex one, actually. But then, the Lab should be more careful about their promotional materials because there is a huge gap between the way users perceive them and their in-world daily reality.

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All I said was that SL is not experimental. You said it was. It doesn't matter if things work or don't work, it's not experimental.

The 38 million number of users is the total sign-ups (accounts) since SL started. Most don't stay and many quit later on, but there's no reason to suppose that the total number is inaccurate.

Concurrency reached just over 90k, although many of them were bots. That was before your time, of course.

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All I said was that SL is not experimental. You said it was. It doesn't matter if things work or don't work, it's not experimental.

Fair enough. Let me put it this way: I feel it as an experimental thing and I do believe that if most of us would take it that way, then our "unhappiness level" about it would be lower.

[...] there's no reason to suppose that the total number is inaccurate.

No, I do believe the number is correct, it just doesn't seem right to me showing it.

Yes, many bots and alt accounts, even nowadays, so I suppose the real number of active accounts won't be far from 90K (if not a lot more.)

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This is good to hear and eveything. However I am worried about the new installer locking out all but the most recent builds of Windows.

 

I can understand why they got rid the old and no longer supported XP, but some of my friends run SL just fine on windows 7, and i'd be sad to see them unable to update the viewer after a time.

As for myself while my laptop has windows 8 I'm not sure if it can be upgraded to 8.1 or if the drivers it has will work with it. I'd hate to be locked out of viewer upgrades due to this. This just seems really harsh, and it's not taking into account that some updates may have to be rolled back, or dont work for some PCs.

 

I"m kinda worried. :(

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You sound worried, yes, but you can overcome what you mention easily enough. For a free upgrade from Windows 8 to 8.1, load this Microsoft page and follow the instructions: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-8/update-from-windows-8-tutorial

Please read all it is written there before trying the upgrade. And read again while doing it. :matte-motes-big-grin:

After the first boot under Windows 8.1, install all the updates Microsoft made available for it. The whole process will take a while, but it works fine — just let Windows do its job.

When your Windows is finally up-to-date, download and install the latest driver for your graphics card.

And that's it, I hope.

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Yes, that's true. Since there is no suggestion of blocking Win7, I suspect that Win8 without the SP1 might have security issues, and that's why it got a mention. Or perhaps the changes with SP1 mean that both with and without need to be supported seperately and that LL doesn't want to have to do that. Since any legal Windows can be updated free of charge, there is no need to do extra work to support Win8 without SP1, so they are giving those without it a head up. That's my suggestion, anyway.

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If I had a desktop PC that upgrade would be easy. However I did a search for my HP Envy dv7 and found a host of issues with making the leap to windows 8.1.

I just hope that my laptop maker can provide fixes in time so I can upgrade. Or I'll have to take to to a tech guy.

:(

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I've been using Firestorm since my second week in SL and I have no plans to move to any other. At the time, the official viewer was a top crasher, so some helper told me about Firestorm — I tried it and kept using it until now.

I'm sure the official viewer is much, much better than it was more than two years ago. And if someone is happy with it, there is no reason to recommend any other (I know that a lot of people don't care about all those additional features I love in Firestorm.) That is why I didn't mention it to you before, but I do believe you just made the best choice and I hope it works for you as it has been working for me so far. :matte-motes-big-grin:

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As I understand it, the code to disable installation on certain older OSs was contributed to the official viewer by the Firestorm team, so I'd be pretty surprised if Firestorm continued to install on systems that won't work for the Linden viewer going forward.  Still, the advice to use a third-party viewer is good: there will be some TPV supporting any older OS until big parts of the viewer code becomes unsupportable on it.

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To be fair, half the people who voted said it was compatible and half said it wasn't, and MS said no action required.

However, I don't think anyone is saying that Windows 8 needs to be upgraded to run Firestorm without issues, any more than has anyone said they'll block Windows 8.

What LL has said is that they strongly advise people to upgrade from Windows 8 to 8.1 because they've found SL is more stable on the latter than on the former (I don't know if that's true of Firestorm or any other TPVs, too).    They've also said that, regardless of what version of Windows you're using, they are stop you from logging in unless you've got the latest updates and service packs for that version installed.

As I understand it, the policy is that you can log in with Windows 7, Windows 8 or Windows 8.1.   LL advise that you upgrade from Windows 8 to 8.1 because you'll find SL is a lot more stable on 8.1, but it's up to you.    However, whatever version of Windows you use, it's going to have to be an up-to-date copy.

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Innula Zenovka wrote:

People may have missed the lengthy and detailed explanation by Landon Linden of what he calls
.

This openness and honesty from the Lab about the causes of disruptions and technical difficulties is very refreshing and welcome, or at least I find it so.

Thank you Landon and LL both.

 I don't understand much of that techical gobble-de-goop that he was mentioning (when I can't log in  I don't care why...I walk away screaming and just try again later) but it is nice that LL is keeping those who do understand in the loop.

Kudos to Landon and LL

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Thank you Linden Lab for communicating with us. It's a long time coming, but much appreciated.

Years ago, someone suggested replacing the MySQL databases with professional-grade systems. I'm not a technical expert, but this seems like a smart idea. Somehow, I can't imagine Air Traffic Control or NASA using MySQL. To the best of my knowledge, MySQL is for Wordpress and other lightweight applications. Maybe it's time for serious investment in SL's infrastructure.

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Okay, then maybe it's time to rebuild the hardware infrastructure. I watch other companies such as CCP Games investing huge resources in upgrading its systems. For over 10 years, there have been two major upgrades of EVE Online per year. Recently, the company has been cleaning up and rebuilding its core infrastructure. As the previous link shows, it's already running on military-grade hardware. It seems silly for Linden Lab to be wrestling with antique systems design.

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threy have been gradually fixing it for years and years, peeling off layers so they aren't all dependent on a single transactio nstream. they had a lot of success with this already, many of the things that used to stop the grid dn't do that any more, even if some servies are down. now it's a few years between armageddons instead of days. they're rebuilding a rolling train, that is always harder and takes longer than if the thing had been built the right way before the ride.

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