zero hour approaches

But look at this... This is what greets me at login!



And FIVE minutes later...



I mean - FIVE minutes and STILL stuff not rezed!

Then I simply walk in a straight line along a path...

Wow! That sucks! If I can find this thread and remember to go visit I'd be curious of my results. Are others visiting there seeing the same issues? (I assume yes) I mean there isnt much in that pic and for it to take forever to load is insane. I might visit tonight when I get home just to check it out.

Generally others find it as good/bad as I do. Sometimes it decides to run OK for an hour or so, though it's been uniformly bad for the last 36 hours.

Some other sims I have visited have been nearly as bad, though most are quite good now

Wow Doc, I don't know what to say. I'm not even sure how to feel. For all my screaming and demanding, I've never thought of leaving. But you drop three figures a month on LL so I can see that you might want to tier down at least if your business is sour.

The question then is do you want to stay inworld and be part of the community?

We suffered some very radical changes when 1.2 was released, and literally months of horrible service during the 1.5 debacle. I can also hook you up with people that have permanently lost tracts of land, half their inventory or all of their money due to some silly bug. They've taken breaks, but they've come back to us.

The phrase "...it looks very much like either a snow job, or, more worrying, that LL do in fact believe their own figures..." has rolled off many lips for the past two years and we still don't know. We've hated to think that they're lying to us; but we've also hated to think that they're senselessly incompetent. I still waffle between the two on a lot of very long term issues.

I've tiered up and back down a couple of times; served as a mentor for a while then left the group; and participated in what I thought were helpful dialogs and projects then seen no tangible results. The feeling that we're being strung along a rosey path won't go away any time soon.

This is not helping is it. What I'm trying to say is tier down if you must, it's a business decision at least. Take a break if you must to get away from the pain. But come back. Come back and be amazed all over again. Start all over again with something brand new. There is still hope here for great things to happen here. I won't give that up until a better product comes along.

Maybe. They have let things slide in such ways before.

UPDATE

OK, Tompson went down for about 20 minutes, no warning, no explanation, just 'poof!' gone - Tompson is an ex-sim.

However, on its return I now have a sim that runs as well as any sim I have seen under 1.7!

OK, object rez on login is s l o w but I can live with it (anyone noticed that the stuff in front of you rezes slowly, but turn around and the stuff behind you is all there?).

However, sim fps, dilation, image time and frame time appear to be locked solid, nothing I can do disturbs them, a marked difference from a few hours ago when simply walking crippled the sim!

Also - an AV tping in has no apparent effect on sim performance now.
All in all a VAST improvement. My personal fps is still about 50% of what it should be, but again, compared with the performance since the upgrade I can just about live with it - for now.

And what is behind the improvement? Well, lacking as usual any communication from LL I had to resort to detective work - easy really - they took Tompson off the completely crap server it was on and put it on a different server...

That's ALL it took. Just putting my sim on some decent hardware. Oh, and 11 days of absolute hell.
In one way I'd like to express my thanks - in another I'm outraged they expect me to pay for being shoved onto a faulty server during the update and consistently ignore my pleas for assistance until I'm literally on the point of leaving.

I'd point out that pushing customers this far is a very risky policy - if I thought it would actually change attitudes...

As for the rest of you who are still suffering from similar problems, well, draw your own conclusions.

I'd like to thank all those of you who have offered advice, encouragement and support, both inworld and in the forums. It's been appreciated.

I'm drawing my own conclusions, and they are these:

If I don't raise hell about the Sim I am on, and continue raising noisy hell about that particular Sim, nothing will ever improve on it.

Only people who raise hell and get some attention will get switched over to the better servers. Those of us who are quiet and waiting patiently will NEVER have these issues resolved.

That means my land - which I recently expanded - will be worthless compared to other people's land.

Am I wrong?

coco

Doc, I've followed your posts holding my breath. As your appreciative neighbor, I personally was not pleased to see you go but in all honesty could not have expected otherwise. I hate to see anyone going through this because the overall condition of SL effects me whether its in my neighborhood or not.

I'd specifically like confirmation that the particular server was trashed and not switched off to become someone else's headache. I guess we won't know unless we see a new saga from someone else posted in the coming days.

Like you, I appreciate that LL is "communicating" with their clients. However, I have had the same concerns. In that recent announcement, they basically said that the majority of the sims are working far better than 1.6. I'm sorry, but I have difficulty believing that when almost every sim I randomly visit is lagging on a pattern basis.



One of the problems may be based on the fact that programmers are notoriously very bad statisticians. The reason: a good statistician needs to understand not only the figures, but also be able to step back and examine the big picture. In general, the psyche that makes up a "programmer" is code-focused and often has difficulty perceiving cause and effects.



With all due respect, it seems that in every instance I have personally dealt with LL regarding analysis of sim performance and statistics, they seemed almost blindly oblivious to facts staring them right in the face. So like you, I have to wonder if sometimes wishful thinking (or corporate butt clenching) prevents them from seeing issues. I have on several occasions brought something to LL attention... have it totally denied, then several weeks/months later they found I was right on the button. So yeah, I have to agree. These stats and charts we're seeing are not reflecting the reality of the grid. Although I did indeed appreciate the honesty in that one chart showing a serious drop in performance between 1.6 and 1.7. It may take LL a while to shift corporate thinking to a more client-open model (so that clients can HELP them solve these problems)... but they do seem to be taking a step in the right direction.



One thing I asked LL to do is to provide me a level-3 server with 2 blank sims loaded (at their cost, because after all, I'm donating my time rather than charging them $10,000 for a professional system analysis). Under such a setup, I could run some serious, non-skewed, non-corporate-biased measurements that could help them locate serious issues. I could also allocate time slots to other users to run their own experiments, with the agreement that all findings/stats/screen shots would be published (and it would be nice if LL could reimburse us for screen shots, because that many texture uploads can run in the thousands of L$). Haven't heard from anyone on this. But in my book, it would be a smart thing for LL to do at this time... because as you mentioned, at this point with all the communications problems that we've been having with LL, people are seriously questioning whether data is true, misinterpreted, manipulated or snow jobbed. That's a perception LL needs to put an end to. It wouldn't be bad if they set up a couple of other servers for some other smart folks to use as well. I'd recommend Foolish Frost as an analyst on one... and as strange as it seems due to our disagreements in the past... a team with Flyingroc on another. Let us put together our own evaluation teams as we see fit. I think that would be a good trio of testers to examine and get to the core of grid testing. Having 3 sims running unhindered under our control for test purposes would compliment LL's internal testing. And of course, the deal is... when we release findings... pay attention. LOL. And it would be of course, nice if we got to keep the sims for our efforts... of course with the idea in mind that these would constantly be test sims. I know if I had a dual-sim server under my total control with all the tools, I could do some heavy duty testing. (and no, I'm not just looking for another sim. Crimeney.. we have 3 already, which is 2 too many. LOL.).

That would be a very effective way for LL to demonstrate to the public that they really are trying to make things better and that they now really are listening to users. I mean, how much more a gesture could be expected than laying out 3 user-controlled test servers with permission to publish all findings? People would pretty much have to respect that. And it would let us work with LL rather than shouting on the forums when we're otherwise ignored. LOL

Providing us with a trio of test servers would be a really good way to indicate they're not trying to hide things. It would be smart on their part to leave those servers up and running and in our control so that we can run needed tests whenever such urge struck us... which it does, on a weekly basis.


Of course, we'd also want some decent tools to do our analysis. Like an explanation of what all those stat tools ACTUALLY do (and I really, really don't want to hear another claim like, "<22ms great, 22ms ok, >22ms baaaad" when stats are jumping all over the board. LOL. what a riot. How are acceptable tolerance levels supposed to be established with stats jumping from 22.3 up to 130? Nah, let US figure out the nice tolerance levels. We will... based on the time tested model of "this is good" as opposed to "durn, that really bites".

Well, in a way Coco... I don't think I've 'raised hell', even though I've been incredibly annoyed about the situation. I've just persisted in explaining my problems and my point of view.

I suppose I'm just lucky. I mean, I don't know if someone made a decision to do something for me after all this time, or maybe my old server just expired in a shower of sparks? Whatever, it seems to have solved my immediate 1.7 problems in the short term - providing the performance is maintained.

I really wouldn't encourage anyone to go off half cocked about their problems though...

Uh, sadly, you seem to be right.

And mind you, I'm not blasting LL here, because I have to believe they have more issues on their plate than any company this side of MicroSoft... and a lot less staff and budget to resolve them.

That said...

We have spent MONTHS trying to discuss things to LL, to get serious issues resolved, to get things worked on. For the most part, we were met with everything from total denial of issues to LL actually blaming US for the problems (the now historical claim, "it's not server issues... it's client content". Such claims were made over and over and over, even in the face of data and tests proving such claims to be wrong. And even when this proof was presented over and over and over, it continued to be pretty much denied and ignored.
Sometimes corporations get that way... especially if management and programmers are stressed. It's human. Interestingly, LL wasn't alone in this, because several customer/users took the same stance.... to such an extreme point that they started gaining a label of "LL groupies" and of course, "trolls".

But when we finally screamed and yelled and stamped our feet on the forums-- we got attention. And interestingly... when we finally got attention, it seems our claims turned out to have some basis. Things started happening. Well durn... there ARE server issues. How about that, customers ARE ticked off and closing down their land. Maybe we do need to improve client communications.

To be totally fair-- the reality has to be realized... LL is dealing with about 1,000 sims and tens of thousands of land owners. There's no way they can meet every single person's needs all at once every day within 24 hours. So folks need to be patient and stop busting LL chops over every single little issue. There are problems and there are PROBLEMS. As clients, we need to discern which is which.

However, the fact also exists that if someone is paying ya money--especially the VIP-level prices many users are paying-- they deserve a voice. And they deserve to have that voice not ignored... especially on major issues.

Well, windy answer, but yeah, you're right. Someone said it long ago.. the squeaky wheel gets the grease. The great thing about this system... if LL will give us the grease... we're willing to help fix the wheels.

Doc, what I actually think is happening... is that LL is finally realizing there are server issues... they're trying to fix them... and they're trying to be more responsive to customer needs-- because they surely don't want customers massively jumping ship. If that means switching a server to see if that helps, they seem to now be willing to do that... even if it's only a temporary fix until they can get the whole ball rolling. That's a good thing I think. A positive step in the right direction of customer service.

Actually I've been thinking about this Wayfinder and I've been wondering if maybe the 1.7 server software isn't either in conflict with certain types of server hardware, or possibly certain versions of the server OS?

It'll be interesting to see which - if we are ever told, which I doubt will happen.

The downtime is about right for either squirting the sim data across the network to another box, or a restore from backup, so maybe it was a hardware issue - either compatability or a serious component failure.

A server OS update would have been faster and probably retained the old server ID.

But wouldn't it be nice to KNOW?

Great Doc.

Now I can go back to flying through your sim on my travels. Glad you got it sorted.

How I've been feeling about LL lately...

Weeeeeeeeeee Up and Down we go

LOL. Copying that one to my computer... taping it on my desk.. LOL

No better... big 10x7 sign at sim telehubs.... LOL


-- No, I wouldn't do that really.

-- Sure I would.

-- No... really...

Well it's still working.

Which leads me to the conclusion that 1.7 CAN be made to work. I know I'm on a new server, maybe the server is running a pre-release server software update?
What I do know is that the sim is now fast (by 1.7 standards) and stable.

Something needs further work though as personal fps is only about half what it was previously even after I have spent considerable time and effort (since the server swap) playing with client setting and the graphics card control panel SL profile. I think I have a visual quality as good as I was getting previously, but my personal fps remains stuck at about 50% of it's previous level almost regardless of settings.

HOWEVER... And people stuck in a world of grey goo that never rezes with sub-single figure personal fps should pay attention to this!
I have found combinations of SL client and PC graphics card control panel settings that can reduce this sim to that condition!

This leads me to wonder if some people having very bad problems may need to set everything to lowest quality - NOT just the client graphics settings - your PC's graphics card control panel too - and IF it produces an improvement, CAREFULLY, noting settings changes, tweak for best performance/quality balance.
There is absolutely NO point in stubbornly refusing to make alterations because 'it worked ok before', not if you want to actually use SL.
Bear in mind that because YOU haven't fiddled with your graphics card control panel setting it doesn't mean that someone else hasn't, or even that the defaults are optimal for SL as it now is.

I really think this might be worth trying for some of you - along with maybe a driver update - and hope it'll improve matters for you.

One positive aspect of SA immigrants to SL is their funny photoshopping.



LF

I'm sure I'd have something to say about that comment if I had any idea what SA meant... (yes I still look at the forums even though I don't play SL any more... why? who knows)

I just logged off in disgust.

Takes many minute to rez any new area.

A script timer of 1 sec takes between 5 and 10 sec to timeout.

I'm frozen in place for sometimes 5 minutes at a time.

Today is by far the worst I've ever seen.

Oh, and I might add... The number of CPU cycles you can execute after you get a detach event are highly unrealiable even for a simple llSay .

I see virtually no forward progress overall during the past week.

Oh...and I've had chat lag all day long...sometimes up to 20 seconds. Once I unimaginable had two chat entries appear out of order! I still can't figure out how that happened.

Moral of the story:

LOL Bitchin pays off