On the weekend of February 8-10 I ran a number of events for the relaunch of our Poppyport airport, marina & harbour, which is located on the Sansara mainland - see www.poppyport.com. At one of these events, but only one of them, we suffered the Sudden Massive Lag (SML) problem where the sim seemed to freeze for about 15-20 minutes. This happened on the Saturday night when Russell Eponym was about to perform at our marina arena.
Russell is a very popular performer in SL, and his events can attract about as many as a sim can hold. On this occasion, however, we only had about 16 at the event - which I am inclined to put down to people not being able to get into the sim either initially or after relogging or being thrown out. This was also fewer than the closing party we had the following day, which nearly 30 attended.
The event on the Saturday when Russell was due to perform was widely publicised through SL's Events Calendar, a number of groups, and on the internet thro our own website, both our Google Calendar & Russell's, and his fan club on Facebook.
My conclusion is that SML was triggered on this occasion by everybody trying to tp into the same spot simultaneously, which the sim server could not handle.
It is interesting also that the event on the Saturday night when SML happened differed from that on the Sunday night, since the Sunday night party actually had a significantly larger number of people who attended but fewer arrived by tp'ing at the same time - as many arrived by boat or plane at the end of a cruise and arrival times were more staggered.
We have another performance by Russell Eponym planned at our marina arena for March 9th, and the question is, what can we do to prevent the same thing happening and the sim being hit by SML?
All I can think of at the moment, is that we should try to stagger how and when people arrive, for example by giving out slightly different start times and also perhaps getting some people to tp into the next sim and then cross over by e.g. boat. Any suggestions would be welcome!
The only other thing which crosses my mind is that, if it were possible to get LL to increase a sim's capacity for large events, that might be a useful thing and one people might be prepared to pay for.