Is the Cloud Working?

[Prokofy Neva]

So I think the point of "moving to the cloud" was to make SL work faster. Although the bottom line was likely rather about saving money for the Lindens on server costs, and that's fine, too.

But there's no question that SL in fact works worse and slower. Here are some of the ways:

o Search is broken. I've written extensively about this. I asked one doubting Linden to search her name and see the 5000 returns and the inability to scroll through enough pages to find her name due to lag. What this means is that paying $30 to place a lot in search/places does not work, it can't be seen.

o Groups don't load. That's always been a problem. You can't search for a name in a group, you have to try one letter, then two letters and wait for it to pull them up. These searches were slow; now they move like glaciers. This problem, and the brokenness of chat, and age-old problem, have forced some groups to move to Discord, which I personally don't like, but at least the chat doesn't freeze.

o When you pay for something on the Marketplace, it takes forever to arrive. It could be slow before -- now it is molasses. Even to the point where a notice now comes up that the merchant cannot sell this item now, although of course they can, it's in stock, copyable etc. Then many minutes go by -- it arrives.

o Group dividends don't arrive the next day but are late.

o When you try to pull up the list of names from the land menu, you can't, or you wait forever.

o When you arrive on a sim, it's not that there's grey squares -- it that things you know are there, like giant trees or somebody's car, just never rez, they never appear. You bump into them sometimes. If you relog sometimes they pop back. I actually thought that somehow everything in a rental had disappeared or I had the wrong group, because I couldn't see things, so I re-decorated it, and came back a few days ago to see everything doubled up.

o The map is abominable. It does not work. You click on it, and it if you try to click on yourself on it to get the coordinates or teleporter to a region, it will give you neighbouring regions God knows where. I have never seen such a broken map. Teleports just don't work via the map, forcing you to crawl-walk across sims, or fish for landmarks, or use broken search to try to find something you know is near where you are going.

There are other things I could add but I have to get back to work.

It's bad.

Let's not all start with this "Works on My Machine" or "maybe you have a lousy computer or internet connection." As always, I point out that 3 months ago, or a year ago, these problems weren't so acute, and I had the exact same computer, graphics card, and ISP. So it's not about the set-up.

 

[Tari Landar]

1 hour ago, Prokofy Neva said:

o Search is broken. I've written extensively about this. I asked one doubting Linden to search her name and see the 5000 returns and the inability to scroll through enough pages to find her name due to lag. What this means is that paying $30 to place a lot in search/places does not work, it can't be seen.

This has been an issue since before the cloud uplift. I think it may have been made a wee bit worse with the uplift, but it's difficult to decipher exactly how, as it really SHOULDN'T happen the way it has. It has nothing at all to do with anyone's individual device, it really couldn't, to be honest. Although I don't personally have issues with search, certainly not the way I have seen others say, I do recognize that it's a big problem for many and it has been for a while. 

1 hour ago, Prokofy Neva said:

o Groups don't load. That's always been a problem. You can't search for a name in a group, you have to try one letter, then two letters and wait for it to pull them up. These searches were slow; now they move like glaciers. This problem, and the brokenness of chat, and age-old problem, have forced some groups to move to Discord, which I personally don't like, but at least the chat doesn't freeze.

This has been an issue for at least six years, on a grand scale, and a minimal scale for years even before that. It has absolutely nothing at all to do with the cloud uplift and anyone, including LL, that suggests it does, is a moron. This amounts to piss poor programming on LL's part, plain and simple. It's been an issue for so damn long that many can't remember when it wasn't. I don't think LL will ever fix this problem, I'm not convinced they know how. 

1 hour ago, Prokofy Neva said:

o When you pay for something on the Marketplace, it takes forever to arrive. It could be slow before -- now it is molasses. Even to the point where a notice now comes up that the merchant cannot sell this item now, although of course they can, it's in stock, copyable etc. Then many minutes go by -- it arrives.

This might have some cloud uplift effect mixed in, or it could simply be LL playing with the damn gears of the MP again. Every time they fiddle with the damn thing, they break something, so I wouldn't chalk this up entirely to the cloud. I wouldn't personally actually link the issue with the uplift at a;l as it's been a problem numerous times over the years. That said, I really don't experience as long of a wait as some people do, for which I am grateful. I always receive items in under 5 minutes, and I know that's probably, almost definitely, not a majority of experiences today.  This problem could easily be fixed by firing everyone that works on the MP, all of them except basic support, and hiring people that know what the hell an ecommerce/marketplace site is, how to program one, how to run one, and how to listen to people when they tell you what's wrong with it. LL won't listen though, they'd rather placate people that can't even program an algorithm for flags properly, lol.

1 hour ago, Prokofy Neva said:

o When you try to pull up the list of names from the land menu, you can't, or you wait forever.

Which list are you referring to? Do you mean access list/ban list, nearby radar, people? Although I don't think any of them SHOULD be affected by the cloud, it's entirely possible if someone fudged something up on the backend. It's not a reasonable cause (because of how it functions, which is boring programming crap), but certainly not impossible.

1 hour ago, Prokofy Neva said:

o When you arrive on a sim, it's not that there's grey squares -- it that things you know are there, like giant trees or somebody's car, just never rez, they never appear. You bump into them sometimes. If you relog sometimes they pop back. I actually thought that somehow everything in a rental had disappeared or I had the wrong group, because I couldn't see things, so I re-decorated it, and came back a few days ago to see everything doubled up.

This is definitely a cloud uplift issue. Although some may say it's your machine, connection, yadda yadda yadda, this is actually more reasonably caused by the uplift and the various issues it has been having. Not everyone will experience it that doesn't make it any less of a problem. While similar issues may have existed periodically in the past, or may indeed be caused by the user end in limited cases, in this case, it's more likely to be an uplift problem. 

1 hour ago, Prokofy Neva said:

o The map is abominable. It does not work. You click on it, and it if you try to click on yourself on it to get the coordinates or teleporter to a region, it will give you neighbouring regions God knows where. I have never seen such a broken map. Teleports just don't work via the map, forcing you to crawl-walk across sims, or fish for landmarks, or use broken search to try to find something you know is near where you are going.

This isn't a cloud issue, either, and there are multiple map related issues. They can't even define the actual problems, or offer an ETA and they have been saying the same thing about this issue since November. The map problems have been around longer than the cloud uplift and usually coincide with something being fudged up on the backend of something else. This is most definitely NOT a user issue, nor is it anything any user can do a damn thing about. LL still refuses to say when they intend to fix the problems, which they originally blamed on the uplift (but that makes no damn sense and the uplift can't be blamed for all problems, despite what some, including some at LL, may think). 

[Prokofy Neva]

9 minutes ago, Tari Landar said:

This has been an issue since before the cloud uplift. I think it may have been made a wee bit worse with the uplift, but it's difficult to decipher exactly how, as it really SHOULDN'T happen the way it has. It has nothing at all to do with anyone's individual device, it really couldn't, to be honest. Although I don't personally have issues with search, certainly not the way I have seen others say, I do recognize that it's a big problem for many and it has been for a while. 

This has been an issue for at least six years, on a grand scale, and a minimal scale for years even before that. It has absolutely nothing at all to do with the cloud uplift and anyone, including LL, that suggests it does, is a moron. This amounts to piss poor programming on LL's part, plain and simple. It's been an issue for so damn long that many can't remember when it wasn't. I don't think LL will ever fix this problem, I'm not convinced they know how. 

This might have some cloud uplift effect mixed in, or it could simply be LL playing with the damn gears of the MP again. Every time they fiddle with the damn thing, they break something, so I wouldn't chalk this up entirely to the cloud. I wouldn't personally actually link the issue with the uplift at a;l as it's been a problem numerous times over the years. That said, I really don't experience as long of a wait as some people do, for which I am grateful. I always receive items in under 5 minutes, and I know that's probably, almost definitely, not a majority of experiences today.  This problem could easily be fixed by firing everyone that works on the MP, all of them except basic support, and hiring people that know what the hell an ecommerce/marketplace site is, how to program one, how to run one, and how to listen to people when they tell you what's wrong with it. LL won't listen though, they'd rather placate people that can't even program an algorithm for flags properly, lol.

Which list are you referring to? Do you mean access list/ban list, nearby radar, people? Although I don't think any of them SHOULD be affected by the cloud, it's entirely possible if someone fudged something up on the backend. It's not a reasonable cause (because of how it functions, which is boring programming crap), but certainly not impossible.

This is definitely a cloud uplift issue. Although some may say it's your machine, connection, yadda yadda yadda, this is actually more reasonably caused by the uplift and the various issues it has been having. Not everyone will experience it that doesn't make it any less of a problem. While similar issues may have existed periodically in the past, or may indeed be caused by the user end in limited cases, in this case, it's more likely to be an uplift problem. 

This isn't a cloud issue, either, and there are multiple map related issues. They can't even define the actual problems, or offer an ETA and they have been saying the same thing about this issue since November. The map problems have been around longer than the cloud uplift and usually coincide with something being fudged up on the backend of something else. This is most definitely NOT a user issue, nor is it anything any user can do a damn thing about. LL still refuses to say when they intend to fix the problems, which they originally blamed on the uplift (but that makes no damn sense and the uplift can't be blamed for all problems, despite what some, including some at LL, may think). 

You seem to think that goal here is to prove that these issues existed before the cloud.

But that's not the point.

The point is that it was supposed to make them better, cure them, make loading of things from tables etc faster. It is not doing that.

And no, search did not break "before" the cloud uplift, unless you mean the break in 2018. It broke after the cloud lift was considerably under way -- just a month or so ago, and after they fixed something else broken.

Perhaps you don't own or rent land. Click on the ground to get the "about land" menu as owner and officer. Tab to objects. You will see a list of the prim owners. That used to instantly load when clicked. Now it doesn't. Again, you must be owner or have a role with powers to do this to see the list of names -- otherwise you only see totals of prims. Obviously radar is unrelated to this and I don't see that as slow or affected by anything now.

The Lindens noticed -- or group owners dogged them -- that the dates were loading all wacky and out of order in groups. They fixed it in their latest intoxicating drink patch called Dawa. Some of the other things they prioritize for fixing elude me as priorities, but they need to look at these basic functions which have slowed considerably.

When the cloud is offered as a improver of SL in terms of speed and such, you can most certainly blame it "for everything" when everything is slower. This might be growing pains, I don't know. But this unwillingness to blame the cloud for anything is silly.

The Lindens acknowledge the map tiles, which have been a hot mess for weeks and getting worse in ways I have never seen (like taking you not to the sim you typed in) -- not better.

With search, they are strangely reluctant to admit it. Maybe it can't be fixed.

With groups, sure, they've been borked for a very long time. When they did a renovation of the groups to remove the idiotic hippie collectivism and such, and made the groups more granular and took out "officer recall" which was ridiculous and a griefing tool, and did a bunch of stuff, I guess the programming was a bolted add-on, or maybe not so stellar, I don't know -- some of the key Lindens involved are in fact good programmers still at the Lab; some are ideologues who may have not in fact done the fixing they should 10 years ago, I don't know the story. But again, the cloud is involved because it was supposed to make pushing data through pipes faster. Wasn't it? 

Edited January 27, 2021 by Prokofy Neva

[Aethelwine]

The cloud uplift seems to have mostly gone smoothly with a few negatives, hopefully outweighed by reduced costs that will get passed on in some way down the line, perhaps with more mainland regions to link up transport routes or reduced costs. 

The Groups issue does seem worse for a few of the groups I am involved with, others seem to have had fixes.. I am not sure what is behind it but as you say Group Chats have been unreliable for as long as I remember being in SL.

I am pretty sure I have seen that the map issue is related to the cloud uplift.

Another issue not mentioned in the list, is the way region crossings run since uplift it has broken a lot of old boats like Motorloon's ones.

Edited January 27, 2021 by Aethelwine

[Paul Hexem]

I'm still waiting for land prices to drop, which will make it worth it.

... I can't tell if I'm being sarcastic or not.

[Arduenn Schwartzman]

2 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

"Works on My Machine"

Yup, here too.

2 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

a year ago, these problems weren't so acute, and I had the exact same computer, graphics card, and ISP.

Sound like you have an acute problem of people staying home during the lockdown and rezzing tons of high-LI N*tmeg sh*t.

And, yes, some growing pains from The Uplift.

[Alwin Alcott]

i think the question shouldn't be if it's about the Cloud, but why there's so lack on info and solving about all the little annoyences (and promesses) that go around for months..together it's not litlle anymore and drives several users to pulling their hairs.

 

[Qie Niangao]

Every project like Uplift ends up re-learning: It's the last 20% that takes 80% of the effort.

And yet... this Map tiles thing, jeez! How can it take so long to fix? This must be some code base, a decade of baling wire and bubblegum.

[ChinRey]

5 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

So I think the point of "moving to the cloud" was to make SL work faster.

No, it wasn't. The cloud is run on perfectly normal web servers and there's no reason to think they'll be faster. AWS' servers may actually be slower than normal web servers right now; they've been busy recently downgrading their server park from traditional Intel powered ones to ones with cheaper Graviton ARM processors.

[Profaitchikenz Haiku]

6 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

So I think the point of "moving to the cloud" was to make SL work faster. Although the bottom line was likely rather about saving money for the Lindens on server costs, and that's fine, too.

My understanding is that the move to the cloud was to get scalability and future-proof the platform more than cutting costs or improving performance.

I think the expectations that everything would be better/faster came about because several issues got put on hold while the move took place, and it was assumed that as part of the move things would get better.

As to whether the cloud is working, I have to say from my experience it's no better nor worse. There are still TP-crashes, region-crossings can be tricky, slow-rezzing and objects invisible, I still encounter these regularly, but apart from the odd "routed to wrong region" I can't see any signs that the cloud has made any real difference to our experiences. The differences it has made are probably visible more to Lab staff, and I don't think we're going to see them posting their gripes on here

Edited January 27, 2021 by Profaitchikenz Haiku

[Jackson Redstar]

I thought the point of moving to AWS was to help out Bezos - he needs a little extra $$ to get him by for a while 😅

 

[ChinRey]

24 minutes ago, Profaitchikenz Haiku said:

My understanding is that the move to the cloud was to get scalability and future-proof the platform more than cutting costs or improving performance.

Yes, that's pretty much it. AWS has more than a million servers so they'll always have one to spare for an extra sim or four. And since they get all kinds of quantity discounts themselves, they can afford to lower their prices and undercut smaller operators.

 

31 minutes ago, Profaitchikenz Haiku said:

I think the expectations that everything would be better/faster came about because several issues got put on hold while the move took place, and it was assumed that as part of the move things would get better.

According to OZ, the LL developers used the cloud migration as an excuse to do some serious code cleaning. That should improve the performance even thous the migration itself didn't.

[Wulfie Reanimator]

16 minutes ago, ChinRey said:

According to OZ, the LL developers used the cloud migration as an excuse to do some serious code cleaning. That should improve the performance even thous the migration itself didn't.

And introduce new exciting bugs...

Edited January 27, 2021 by Wulfie Reanimator

[ChinRey]

1 minute ago, Wulfie Reanimator said:

And introduce new exciting bugs...

About time. The old ones were getting a bit tedious and repetitive.

[Tari Landar]

5 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

You seem to think that goal here is to prove that these issues existed before the cloud.

But that's not the point.

That was YOUR point, my point was that some of these issues have been an issue for a very long time and no amount of cloud uplifting can fix them. 

5 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

And no, search did not break "before" the cloud uplift, unless you mean the break in 2018. It broke after the cloud lift was considerably under way -- just a month or so ago, and after they fixed something else broken.

Yes, it did, the particular issue YOU are experiencing may be new, to you, but search has had numerous issues for years on end. Try looking outside of your own scope for five minutes and you might learn something. Notice that not once did I blame you, your system, your whatever, for the problems. I just happen to know that a lot of them have nothing to do with the cloud and loading onto the cloud couldn't possibly fix them at their core.

5 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

Perhaps you don't own or rent land. Click on the ground to get the "about land" menu as owner and officer. Tab to objects. You will see a list of the prim owners. That used to instantly load when clicked. Now it doesn't. Again, you must be owner or have a role with powers to do this to see the list of names -- otherwise you only see totals of prims. Obviously radar is unrelated to this and I don't see that as slow or affected by anything now.

That's not made clear by your original "the list of land names", which is why I asked for clarification. You'll also note I didn't say it wasn't affected by the uplift, just that it SHOULDN'T be.

5 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

The Lindens noticed -- or group owners dogged them -- that the dates were loading all wacky and out of order in groups. They fixed it in their latest intoxicating drink patch called Dawa. Some of the other things they prioritize for fixing elude me as priorities, but they need to look at these basic functions which have slowed considerably.

Where, in anything that I said, did I disagree with you that LL drops the ball on things? You never actually read what anyone has to say to you, you just seem to assume you knew where they were going with it just so you can argue. 

5 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

When the cloud is offered as a improver of SL in terms of speed and such, you can most certainly blame it "for everything" when everything is slower. This might be growing pains, I don't know. But this unwillingness to blame the cloud for anything is silly.

Again, reading comprehension is important. I never once said the uplift isn't responsibly "for anything". But you literally blame the cloud uplift for every damn problem you have, or think you have, and in some cases, it's just not possible for the cloud uplift to have been the culprit, it's just not. If you were under the impression that the uplift was going to solve most, or all, of the existing problems, you were mislead. Some of the problems, like I said, can't be solved by moving to the cloud. Yes, it was offered as an improvement for SOME things, but certainly not all, and I have never seen it advertised as that. But you don't seem to like to read those things,  because they're too technical for you. I get that, you don't like that geeky, programmer sort of side of things, and you don't have to. But dismissing it all because you don't understand, don't want to understand, or simply don't like, is foolish.

5 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

The Lindens acknowledge the map tiles, which have been a hot mess for weeks and getting worse in ways I have never seen (like taking you not to the sim you typed in) -- not better.

That's what I said, or did you not read that part too?

5 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

With search, they are strangely reluctant to admit it. Maybe it can't be fixed.

Been broke for very long time and the cause definitely has more to do with programming than it does the uplift. No, I don't think they're currently capable of fixing it, and the uplift to the cloud certainly would have NO effect on this hot mess. 

5 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

With groups, sure, they've been borked for a very long time. When they did a renovation of the groups to remove the idiotic hippie collectivism and such, and made the groups more granular and took out "officer recall" which was ridiculous and a griefing tool, and did a bunch of stuff, I guess the programming was a bolted add-on, or maybe not so stellar, I don't know -- some of the key Lindens involved are in fact good programmers still at the Lab; some are ideologues who may have not in fact done the fixing they should 10 years ago, I don't know the story. But again, the cloud is involved because it was supposed to make pushing data through pipes faster. Wasn't it? 

You're partially correct, uplift IS/WAS supposed to help with some things, but it's not a fix all solution for every problem. It can't assist with problems that have nothing to do with the way it functions. The group issues have been around for ages, longer than some reading this have probably even been in sl. Uplifting to the cloud can only assist with issues like this by simplifying and combining other processes thereby leaving more resources dedicated to this problem. Uplifting to the cloud can't fix bad programming, no matter how streamlined the data flow is made, bad data (bad programming) is going to remain so until someone fixes it. You can't put muddy water through a hose and expect it to  come out crystal clear on the other end. This sort of issue is akin to that. Or if you'd prefer, automating a packaging process that would normally be done by hand can't be an improvement if the products being sent through for packaging are broken. It's the same concept really. If it doesn't work, at its core, before being uplifted to the cloud, the data stream is going to be just as messed up when it gets there. Not everything goes through the cloud either, at least not in the sense I think you believe the cloud functions anyway, but that's way too much boring programming mumbo jumbo. I don't know who convinced you that moving to the cloud would solve all of, or even most of, sl's problems, but you probably shouldn't trust that person, because they lied. It can only fix so much on its end, LL is still completely responsible for making sure things, basic things, work first

[Tari Landar]

2 hours ago, Qie Niangao said:

Every project like Uplift ends up re-learning: It's the last 20% that takes 80% of the effort.

And yet... this Map tiles thing, jeez! How can it take so long to fix? This must be some code base, a decade of baling wire and bubblegum.

Spaghetti programming, except way more complicated and likely so broken at this point that starting over from scratch would be a much better idea than trying to sort that mess. 

[Ardy Lay]

I blame UDP.  It gets lost in the cloud and seeds precipitation then everything gets mushy.

[Mollymews]

9 minutes ago, Ardy Lay said:

I blame UDP.  It gets lost in the cloud and seeds precipitation then everything gets mushy.

i think you are right

i can't find it now, but as I remember Oz Linden (i think it was) said something similar recently about network issues we might be experiencing. Seems they pretty much start and end with UDP. So Linden's effort to eventually remove all UDP from the SL system

[Profaitchikenz Haiku]

39 minutes ago, Mollymews said:

o Linden's effort to eventually remove all UDP from the SL system

I queried this at the server user group meeting quite some time back, after all the avatars-as-cloud and Lumiya failures came about when LL removed the UDP clothing support. UDP was apparently still being used and when I asked why this was so when we had been told UDP was so-yesterday it had to go, Oz replied that they were now using UDP for what it was supposed to be used. Or something like that. My guess is that UDP was overloaded with lots of inventory stuff trying to get passed across on it and so that side of things got replaced, presumably by the bake service, In a more recent post in the Tchnical sub-forums regarding frequent inability to remain logged in for more than a minute or so, Oz replied that the symptoms the user was described described what happens when UDP communications had failed. Not sure what it's going to be replaced with, and I haven't heard anything on this.

[FairreLilette]

9 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

o Search is broken. I've written extensively about this. I asked one doubting Linden to search her name and see the 5000 returns and the inability to scroll through enough pages to find her name due to lag. What this means is that paying $30 to place a lot in search/places does not work, it can't be seen.

I have had some problems with this.  So I use SEARCH a different way - see screenshot below.  I bypass the WEBSEARCH part and click open an individual tab such as PEOPLE, then type the name in that white box there and that works.  

 

9 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

o When you pay for something on the Marketplace, it takes forever to arrive. It could be slow before -- now it is molasses. Even to the point where a notice now comes up that the merchant cannot sell this item now, although of course they can, it's in stock, copyable etc. Then many minutes go by -- it arrives.

I haven't experienced other things you mention above but I've never had any problem whatsoever with group chat or groups, although I've heard other people have.  Me, no, never.

But, Marketplace YES...super slow.  I've gotten a bit used to it now though.  What I do is close my Windows window after a purchase and then click on RECENT or click on stuff in my inventory and then suddenly my items will arrive much quicker.  

Second Life is probably near 20 years old now and it wasn't meant to run all these heavy polygon items.  The cloud allows ME to have a social life in Second Life and rez these high polygon people, and I can shop inworld at events and it rezzes in a jiff.  The cloud is amazing, give it time.  

 

Edited January 27, 2021 by FairreLilette

[Solar Legion]

Tari, there's no point in going back and forth with the OP on anything as they always pull what you're experiencing here (and worse). Heaven forbid you accuse them of being wrong about something (as they are about the Object Owners section in About Land).

As far as the technical issues are concerned, you're mostly right in that many of them predate the Uplift with a tiny fraction being made worse. Hopefully they get better as bugs are squashed.

[Rowan Amore]

1 hour ago, FairreLilette said:

I have had some problems with this.  So I use SEARCH a different way - see screenshot below.  I bypass the WEBSEARCH part and click open an individual tab such as PEOPLE, then type the name in that white box there and that works.  

 

 

That may work in the viewer but not on the website.  I started a jira about the issue.  At first, they said they couldn't reproduce the issue then came back and said they had.  Searching for a specific person who is not hidden from search returns hundreds of results yet none are for the specific person/name.  Unfortunately, they closed it with this last comment.

Dropping back in to say: we've found some resident names that indeed do not show up in search! We'll investigate further and work on a fix. Thanks again for the report!

[FairreLilette]

1 hour ago, RowanMinx said:

That may work in the viewer but not on the website.  I started a jira about the issue.  At first, they said they couldn't reproduce the issue then came back and said they had.  Searching for a specific person who is not hidden from search returns hundreds of results yet none are for the specific person/name.  Unfortunately, they closed it with this last comment.

Dropping back in to say: we've found some resident names that indeed do not show up in search! We'll investigate further and work on a fix. Thanks again for the report!

So, in general, it seems to me there are some problems with "search".  However, I just wanted to say from what I've read and heard inworld is the cloud does not seem to be the cause of the problem BUT the cloud is magnifying the problems that were already there, almost screaming "fix me" to the probs that were already there now that SL runs in the cloud.  

I'd just like to say one thing about search that goes far beyond finding a name of a resident though and that's people paying $30 for an ad as stated in the OP.  That could lead to a huge loss in revenue and maybe then ADs should be put somewhere else like on the forum somewhere.

I use the DESTINATION GUIDE mostly and that works just great like it always did for me.  

EDIT to add:  Regarding difficulty searching, perhaps that is what is causing the Marketplace problem - it's taking a long time to search and find the username to deliver the items too?  

Edited January 27, 2021 by FairreLilette

[Solar Legion]

With incredibly few exceptions, no one is paying $30 for ads. The amount the OP is lamenting is L$30 paid per parcel for that parcel to show in Search.

That last bit is important and - splitting hairs here - is not an Ad. Classifieds are Ads. Showing a Parcel in Search is a L$ sink.

[Ardy Lay]

select id,  user_name, display_name from user_accounts where user_name like 'Ardy%' order user_name;

Oops, nope.  They are using a web search algorithm that parses word roots and modifiers, links in a thesaurus and a relevance index built from a collective bias of previously selected results from similar previous searches where similar is also defined by relevance.  WEIRD and ultimately useless.