Lydia Craig

This is not isolated or two people but is occurring all over sl, as the level of service sharpely declines. The time for being patient has run out and if LL will not take the steps it needs to correct this mess, the need to seriously consider rebating players for the time they have lost to inferior service, because otherwise the builders and business people who have made sl will continue to leave and no amount of new players will easily replace their experience no matter how much LL may wish and pretend this is true. To sum up inventory is a total mess, teleports are at best unstable, lag and memory leaks are horrendous, crashes are constant and multiplying, and it is not getting better.

Have at times had the same problem, the viewer locks up and you crash eventually. Also loading inventory has become almost impossible again, somehow the fixes they made to inventory early last week were apparently undone by the fixes they made later or something else that was done. At this point service is as bad as I have ever seen it and the problems fixed with the RC servers two restarts ago returned last week worse than ever. All this makes you wonder if LL actually cares about service at all and what the hell we are do paying them for service that is worse than it was 5 years ago. This has got to change and change soon even if LL has to buy a new database and hire people capable of running it. The present inept and declining service is unacceptable and people are staying away in droves, so guys fix this mess or suffer the consequences and quit making excuses and trying to avoid the issue and deal with it once and for all.

I am hardly new, and have been on for nearly 6 year, and have witnessed a steady erosion of both services and support in SL. Until today things were working relatively well recently, but today rivaled and probably topped the worst performance I have yet seen in SL, and to add insult to injury I noticed just now that we had a "billing issure" last night. This is a clear sign on general data base failing when coupled with the other problems of yesterday, and no amount of distraction from LL driven nay sayers can hide this fact. Hopefully, they can fix some of these issues and this thing will last awhile longer, but in the end the only practical solution is a new database, and it is debatable if is even willing or capable of taking that step.Those of you who do not like to hear this get used to it because things are getting worse and most likely will continue to do so until LL either fixes this problem or destroys SL completely.

Since this morning's work crashes have been constant, logins take hours and often end unexpectedly, inventories fail to load, lag has increased alarmingly, and appears to be accompanied by a massive memory leak that is affecting not just inventory but the entire database. At this point it may be time to give up trying to fix the mess piecemeal, and buy a new database robust enough to handle the demands of Second Life and a Database Manager with the experience and knowledge to keep the thing going. Otherwise with a few more days like today SL may become history.

If it is the RC code not telling us is understandable, since for the last three weeks that code has created unmitigated chaos, and the RC servers have at times been virtually unplayable. Last weeks unannounced restars did some good but the problem is not fixed and the crashes and lag continue and if LL insists on foisting this situation on the rest of SL they are deserving only of contempt. If the servers are an simple and harmless tweak It only takes a moment to say so, and if they are in fact new and questionable code the player population deserves fair warning. It is for reasons like this and the lag and poor performance that LL had created through this type of folly that stores and businesses are closing in droves and peope have begun to loose whatever trust they had left in LInden Labs. At this point for the good of SL LL needs to be as transparent and open as possible because player patience is fast wearing out;

For the inventory problem you may want to dump cache and let it reload, there is likely an item in it that is corrupting your load and causing it to freeze up. Basically, these inventory problems and the log out problem you were encountering are not the fault of your computer or of your Isp. They began a couple of weeks ago after a restart and have steadily gotten worse, and likely stem from some problems inherent in sl scripting language, its timing and its relation to the database. In short for some reason the sl server times out and does not send the needed commands to your computer which either logs you out or stops your inventory from loading. Those who mouth the LL propaganda line that it is all your isp and computer are simply feeding you disinformation to cover the mess LL had made of sl over the last three years with it failed attempts to make sl scripting do things it is not designed to do.

Thank you for not posting notice of today's restarts in grid status, this just verifies that keeping players informed is not a Linden priority as the low numbers of players online is starting to verify that SL is not longer a player priority. In fact when you subtract the horde of bots, which officailly dont exist, one wonders just how many players are on line anyway. In all seriousness, restarts are bad enough, but restarts without warning other than in the chat window, and not even on the grid status page are a new low, and if any of you cared a bit about the player population would never happen. Again your actions speak louder than your words or lack of them and the picture they paint is not a pretty one.

Please just fix the mess you have made of blue steel with it massive lag, apparent memory leaks, and crashes. Denying the problem exists as you are now only further erodes peoples trust in Linden Labs and encourages more to leave what is starting to appear to be a sinking ship, but if you can't fix the mess you have created at least admit it is a mess and allow those who request it to get out of the RC system as you promised and stop making yourselves look foolish by denying the obvious problems that have been endemic in blue steel since your last update.

Three things would be extremely helpful. First, LL needs to go back to the old restart warning system, stip relying on open chat which is often missed if you are buy in IMs, building or doing virtually anything but scanning chat. Two it would be nice if they would tell us what they intend to accomplish by this move, what we should expect while its it going on, and when servers are down for unusual times give us reports on their current condition. Finally, it would be extermely good if LL provided a post event team to help with any problems that may arise during this process. Sadly, this is expecting a bit much of LL at the moment and we likely will be met with the same attitude as usual and given empty or vague information and meaningless promises, and the result will be another exodus of players and customers from SL.

A quick heads up Oskar, there appears to be a serious problem developing on the le tigre servers. Last night at The Firehouse Strip club we had chairs and poles vanishing as soon as people got up or off them. By working with Live Chat I was able to get the attention of the technical team and they apparently fixed the problem there. Unfortunately, I just got a message from a friend who owns Escort Island, who told me she is starting to get poles vanishing there, so I think there is a good chance it is starting to appear on other servers. My suggestion is check with the technical people and find out what they did last night to fix Fountain head and then Check whatever sim Escort island is on and see if it is the same problem there. We have another sim in our system Zerango that we have asked to have removed from the RC system and it too is in le tigre and I will keep an eye on it to see if the problem appear there. This though is about the most disruptive bug I have seen yet and needs to be addressed at once before it causes a number of clubs to start to close, since under the circumstances it is impossilbe to operate them under these conditions. I sincerly hope you see this notice and pay attention to it because in five years of managing clubs in sl I have never seen a single more disruptive and destructive problem than this one and that includes the early days of the copybot terror. Thank you Lycia Craig

Yes this problem apparently has existed for at least 5 years as I had to go through it when I entered sl 5 years ago. Fortunately at that time I was able to find a linden to help, after bouncing around billing getting no help for month. The soluteion he gave was to set it up with a credit or debit card, and that worked fine. I am amazed that this problem is still going on and marvel at a company that cannot find a way t take money from customers who are offering it to them.

If you want to know the impact of this restart on Blue Steel and those that use it is simple, lag in inventory and the communication window is massive, regular lag in other database related functionons is still terribe, lag and crashes after teleports still continue to be a problem, and inventory loading now is taiking more relogs and oftern requires a dump of the inventory cache. If you intention was to make things even more difficult for users of third party viewers and drive them out of SL you would seem to be a rousing success, but if you were actually trying to improve things this is a dismal failrue, and we cannot stand many more like it.