The Lag Monster Myths

I asked the question in good faith. All I want to know is what concrete steps LL can do to help you in your current situation. Regardless, thank you for answering my question anyway.



Allegedly? You mean you're not angry?



What would you like the lindens to admit to, exactly? It seems to me, that Lee has already admitted that many of your problems are grid-wide problems as well.



1.7 is scheduled to come out next week.



Some technical problems are not easily or quickly solved. All of us would like lag problems to go away *now*. Sometimes it's not so easy. Wait a week or two, maybe many of the problems are already solved by 1.7.

If not, raise hell again .

Fair enough. We'll all look forward to.

What we want to make sure doesn't continue is the same bull that LL has snowed us with the last 6 months. Coming out with 1.7 doesn't change a company attitude. And I think that's what folks are really angry with Flyingroc... is the basic dishonesty in the way LL has been dealing with clients who have been/are paying through the nose for their service. 1.7 might solve some problems. It won't solve that one.

One thing I'd like to point out: Linden Lab making grid-shaking announcements in the forums does not fill the bill as far as client relations go. Things that affect the entire grid should be announced in-game. There are many users who do not read the forums because of the immaturity present here, and there are others who simply don't have the time. We didn't join SL to spend hours reading forums. There are many things that LL is handing through the forums that really need to be announced in-game. If 1.7 is due out in a week-- that announcement should be made to every user on the grid... not just the few who mess with reading the forums on a daily basis.

You know Flyingroc... I really hate grammar games.
I can speak for ME. I'm ticked. I can't speak for other sim holders. Thus allegedly.

Why do I even keep messing with this trivial nonsense? I'm discussing LL user policies and you all are playing word games.



And in the same breath telling us that what LL has been saying about content is right all along. You know, I haven't mentioned this, but Lee is one of the ones who we had the "misinformation" problems with in the first place. So excuse me if I'm not pro-Lee right now. When someone tells me things that I later learn to be bogus... and especially when those claims cost me weeks of wasted time... I stop listening to further claims and focus on the facts.

I'm not asking Linden Lab to "admit" to anything. The truth is out. I want them to clean up their act and start showing some respect for their customers.

getting rid of people will get rid of lag.

LETS DOOO IT.

Just striving for clarity. When you said "... why am I and other sim owners allegedly angry at this point?" It seemed to me that you might not have believed what I had assumed -- that you were angry at Linden Lab. Thus the query.

Thank you for pointing out that my assumption was correct in the first place.

LOL.

"An empty sim is an efficient sim."

I love it.

Fair 'nuff. Yeah, I am angry at LL. Accurate statement.

And as I just learned today.. so are a bunch of other people. Not going to speak for others here... but like you pointed out earlier, we'll see what happens over the next few weeks-- and we'll see if LL starts cleaning up its act in regard to customer relations.

If they do start treating customers with more respect and if 1.7 is as good as it's touted to be (even if we have to help them with some bugs) I'll be the first one in line to pat LL on the back.

"It isn't a party 'til you crash."

I had something useful to say, but I'ts already been said somewhere in this thread.

But lag happens, and in most cases the flow is only as fast as the slowest user connected. That said, I'm not 100% sure how SL handles everything (or anything) But it's bittersweet to say, I've gotten used to the lag.

If a laggy sim has nobody in it to experience the lag, is it really laggy at all?

The fun question is, however, if a prim falls in the forest, and nobody is there to see it, does it exist? I think, with how "MMOs" work, the answer is yes. And that is relatively inefficient. Now.. if they released an offline version of SL... the answer would be no. and therefor.. no lag

But the parties would be boring. :coff:

I don't know how you're unaware of my programming background, since I told you that background in a PM. I've done LOTS of programming. I'm a professional systems analyst. Owned my own company for mumbletymumble years. Not blowing my horn. Just responding to your message. Yeah, I know how hard it is to debug programs. I also know that every single time a client has contacted me with a bug problem, I've had a fix out in 24 hours flat. 72 hours max for tough bugs. That's the only way to run a business in my book. When I found a verified bug, I immediately contacted the client, told them they were right, admitted the mistake, told them when the fix would be out and in some cases gave them a reward for helping me hunt down a bug that was somewhat evasive. That's how I deal with clients. I treat them with respect and honesty. As a result, I have loyal, return clients rather than people wanting to strangle me because their software doesn't work.

Unlike LL, I didn't sit on a known, major bug for months on end and ignore clients who notified me about it, and then when a client finally got exasperated and irate use a copout, "Yeah, we know that's there, but it's not on our priority list right now." Man, that is a way to lose clients for sure.



I appreciate what you're saying, however, many professional programmers would look at Micro$oft and shake their heads in disgust. Micro$oft is an extremely profitable and "successful" company-- from a sheer money standpoint. They also have more people that hate their guts than any other software company I know. There are anti-Micro$oft hate groups.

Micro$oft got where they are by breaking the law, not by having a good product. There are other products out there that could have been far better than Windows, but they never got a chance because Bill Gates used highly illegal means to gain a stranglehold on the market-- and the government let him get away with it. Windows is one of the most shabbily written "professional" products I've had the displeasure of working with. It is a memory hog and an asset hog and full of bugs and security holes and Micro$oft is only NOW starting to get its head on straight and fix things. And why? Because clients started suing them to the gills, that's why. Because people screamed at them. Because clients started switching to Apple and Linux out of frustration. Because the European court declared them a monopoly and slammed them a LOT harder than the wimpy US courts (I mean really, sentencing Micro$oft to give free copies of their software to schools? Apple must have screamed. What a moronic decision!).

LL seems to be following the Micro$oft model to the tee, with one difference: Windows is an essential product. Second Life isn't. SL has/will have some serious competition. And customers will not put up with the Micro$oft/Bill Gates stunts on LL, because SL does not have a stranglehold on them. There ARE other options (such as turning on the TV and watching a movie).

Micro$oft is a highly-profitable, lousy excuse for a company. They charge excessive, unreasonable prices for their product and make it unaffordable for the average computer user (thus bringing about extensive pirating of past products). People won't put up with the Micro$oft philosophy on SL. They don't have to. They'll simply leave.

This may be very true for you, but from what I have seen in the code writting business, this is not always the case. First of all, it really depends on what kind of program you write, what it is written for, and what user inputs are. With some of the code that we have written, we have known bugs that are going on 2 years old now. We know they are there, we even know how to fix them, but we let them sit as more important issues are addressed.

You seem to have an issue not with the bug, but with the way LL has handled the found bug. Am I wrong on this assumtion? From reading this thread, it sounds to me that LL is trying to help, but can't or you have something that is pointing in a different area the LL wants to try and put you. Maybe the biggest problem here is not the bug, but with communication between LL and their customers.

PS, I don't want to completely derail this thread with your attacks against MS, we can save that for an off topic thread

I am sorry if this has been stated before, I have not finished reading the entire thread.

Thank you Wayfinder and Lee for your analysis and reply. What would truly be useful is a list of ranges of what is "normal" or at least "acceptable" for each of the statistics so when looking at them we can identify more easily what could be potential problems.

The best would be color coding this in the client from green to red so when experiencing a problem you can open up that display and see which areas could potentially be problematic.

But merely a list of ranges on the forums would be a great start!

Like right now I am looking at my sim and I have "Run Tasks" at around 65% which is significantly higher than any of the others, however I do not know if this is something I should worry about or if this is normal.

I have a different philosophy: "Bugs come first". When a bug is discovered, it's fixed before new features, before new updates, before additional coding. A bug is a flaw in existing structure and I don't care HOW nice that new front door is gonna look... won't be much good if the foundation crumbles out from under it.

Yes, there are *some* bugs that are so minor and so rare that they really don't matter all that much. That's a judgement call. But when we contacted Linden Lab last April with a bug that can occur when someone tries to set pre-built land to group-- a bug that can actually destroy an entire sim-- and LL to this day has not fixed this bug-- thus preventing us from setting our sims to group control-- how is that excusable? How is that good customer service? That bug is based on bad land/prim math algorythms that LL has in place, and it affects other areas of play as well. That is a major, sim-destroying bug that has existed for ages and has hit us 4 times to date under different situations.

How long did it take LL to decide to finally tackle the ghosting bug? Interesting how the fix came about shortly after we started busting their chops on the forums about ghosting causing so many problems in the user interface. (and that's why we bust LL chops in the forums... because they don't seem to listen to us otherwise).



In a way. I've got a problem with LL in that a) they leave major bugs and client needs untouched because they don't seem to deem them important b) they don't communicate with clients c) they keep bringing out new, somewhat worthless tools (hate to harp on it, but the silly SL video) when other basic, more common sense needs are ignored (such as giving officers the ability to send out group notecards and announcements) d) they seem to be constantly making decisions or changes to their system that wind up with it being worse than it was in the first place-- and some that even tick off their clients royally. They seem to put in features that fall short of client needs or that don't work at all-- and never get fixed (waste of time).

We complain about these things and they say, "Sorry, we can't allocate enough time to that." What, they can allocate time to putting movies on SL, but not to allow groups to properly communicate? BAD CALL people.

I'm not the only one who feels that way either. Just read other forum posts for hundreds of other users who feel exactly the same way.

I guess it all depends on were the bugs fall on the "to do" list at LL. One bug that may seem major to you, may be in fact minor to LL because it only effects a small part of the population. Or maybe the bug goes much deeper into the code then they can even find. They have trouble reproducing bugs too. If they can't find the root cause, then it is really hard to fix. This may not be the case for this issue, but in general that is why some bugs go unanswered. Like you said yourself, it all comes down to judgement calls.



Ghosting has been an issue since day 1. People have been complaining about the ghosting issue for as long as I can remember. There were small improvements before, but it really seems that they went full force into fixing it with 1.6. I am not sure how effective the forums are really. If, as I have been told, only 10% of all the users ever come to the forums, does it really matter? There seems to have been a number of issues that have not been answered that have really stirred things up in the forums. I guess it is up to LL on how much weight the place on the forum talk.



It seems to me that LL is stuck between a rock and a hard place. Everyone wants bugs to be fix, and at the same time everyone wants SL to continue to grow. People want features. If LL stopped all new features, people would complain. Look at how they haven't placed in HAVOK2 and HTML in yet and all the people that are whinning about that? What is LL suppost to do? If they fix bugs, people will complain. If they add features, people complain. It seems to me that with 1.7 LL has focused mainly on the lag bugs in sims. That seems to me to be the biggest thing they have been working on. Will 1.7 have bugs? Sure it will, but then the patches will be released and we will start the process all over again. It is all in the balance between bugs, features, and what is good for LL.

Look, Wells Fargo has this huge program of which we are a small subset. Our small subset, and god knows what else, is managed by a company called Swivel Media. Swivel juggles Bedazzle, Linden Lab, Wells Fargo, and god knows who else. The WF people... well, I've never met one. I don't even know if they have avatars. I was given a deadline and at the end of it I was told the WF people were going to take a look at it. We removed some sluttier clothing per their request, tweaked the interest model and thats just about all the input they had on this.
The only technical person in this whole shebang is me. Neither Swivel nor Wells have any direct involvement with the system... let alone shell access.
You'll never have shell access, but I'd love to have a little console built into the client... imagine, handling multiple objects with regex's and having the world organized into a neat tree structure of sims, parcels, objects, scripts...

Welcome to the business world, Dnate.

If you're going to charge clients professional fees, you better do a professional job. People don't pay to listen to excuses.

As a note: "If they fix bugs, people will complain"? I don't think I've ever heard anyone complain about a fixed bug. In fact, people have been on LL's tail for months to stop focusing on new features and to concentrate on bug fixes instead. But LL is so "full speed ahead and da** the torpedoes" that they're building the walls while the foundation is still shaky.

Yeah. 1.7 will have bugs. And likely a number of those bugs will be carryovers from 1.6. We don't expect flawless code, nor do we expect a totally hassle-free environment. We do expect LL to deliver what we're paying for (such as a dedicated server when we buy a dedicated server). We expect an end of the deceptions, direct answers to our questions, and for LL to conduct themselves like professionals.

Back to Paulie's suggestions about tools: you know what tools I want to have? The same steenkin' tools the Linden Lab agent has when they come to my sim and says, "Oh yeah, I see the problem. You're running on the same server with two other sims." Those are the tools that I want. >:<

I want the tools to kick some idiot off the sim who just set a nuke device. I want the tools that allow me to do more intricate terrain texture arrangements. I want the tools that shows where each active script is on the entire sim. I want some of these neat toys that the Lindens have that by all rights we should have, because we paid for the server, we're paying the monthly sim fees, and it's OUR sim.

I know that there are some proprietary tools that because of valid security reasons LL cannot share. That's a given. But there seem to be a lot of tools that LL employees have that sim owners should have access to, and that is what we want. I don't think that's too unreasonable, is it LL?

I am talking about if they go forward with just bug fixes, people will complain. They will stay "LL is not doing enough to move forward."

I think LL is doing professional job. I think they really are trying their best to move the metaverse forward. Will they do it perfectly? No, but at least they trying to do it right. I bet if they were not working on bugs, we would have HAVOK2, HTML, and many of the other things that we are asking for. It is the balance they are trying for, and I think that doing a great job on it. Bug fixes are important, but so is moving the platform forward.

Well Dnate, glad to hear you're all peachy-happy with LL and that your world is all rosy.

If you don't mind my asking... how much land do you own? Not wanting to put you on the spot, so you don't have to answer. But if you don't own a good size chunk of land or a sim... perhaps you're not seeing the problems that large landholders deal with every day.

And I'll repeat Dnate... it's not the bugs that tick us off. It's LL treatment of its clients. Bugs are bad enough. A company that deceives its clients is another thing entirely. When we ask a direct question and are either ignored or outright lied to... that's a whole different level of problem.

Because I've noticed an apparently direct correlation between LL clamming up the closer we seem to get down to the truth.

Two users thus far have challenged Linden Lab to let them on the premesis with qualified techs to see if LL is being straight with us. LL has not responded. I asked LL to provide us with full data specs on the servers they use, including manufacturer, model, configuration specs, and price. They have not provided me with that information. Now considering that we supposedly BOUGHT that equipment, I think we're entitled to know exactly what it is we bought and what it cost, don't you?

I don't care how a system runs (well or not), if a company takes client money and then does not provide what was presented or deceives that client-- that's called fraud. And when a client has evidence that fraud is being committed, they have every right to demand of that company proof of operation and fulfillment of contract.

I don't see this. What LL says they will give you and what you get is the same. LL promised a sim and you got a sim. You are not "buying the hardware," you are paying for the set-up costs of the hardware. I am not sure where you get the idea that you get a server that only your single sim runs on for $1250, but that would seem really cheap for an entire server. In a hotline post, Robin did say what the servers were.

I am still waiting to see your proof that LL lies to you, and the data to back it up, so I will have to side will LL on that issue. To me, it seems that Lee has been helpful in this thread trying to help you, but you just basicly tell him to go away, so I am not sure what else can be done.

Just because you say, I want to see myself what you are doing, does not mean you are going to get granted access. I want to see all of LL accounting for my own reason, but do you think they will let me see the books? I wouldn't even ask. If you really fell that LL is defrauding you, sue them. Goto court, have a court order letting you see all the back end stuff you need to see, and get your money back. If you really have such strong evidance, then I would suggest that is the best course of action.

BTW, I own about 1/4 of a sim right now, and one of my biggest issues with my land is the lag. I know why I am getting so much lag, it is because the sim has a script run time of between 10-15ms. I see 1.7 as a huge fix for my issue.

Personally, SL1 is as feature-rich as I should like it to be; I'd be far more interested in stability improvements.

Indeed, I contend that SL is a prototype that has now exceeded all design expectations and has notable, fundamental, irremediable scalability problems. There have also been indications that LL has indeed learned from their successes and failures and is working diligently on SL2 which ought ameliorate many of them. It would not surprise me at all that - like many prototypes - SL1 has gotten to the point where it is showing emergent system failures that if not impossible to fix are completely infeasible to fix. The only fault I can ascribe to LL should these informed presumptions be true is not where they have chosen to allocate their scarce resources or even that they are mired in the tar of SL1; it is simply their disingenuousness about the matter that I find displeasing.

For all I know, bumping subscriber numbers in order to increase revenue at the cost of destabilizing SL1 further may be exactly the right thing to do if it aids in getting SL2 to deployment faster. There may even be spectacular reasons (e.g. the the Osborne Computer debacle of 1983) for speaking little about SL2 development and SL1 issues. It doesn't mean I have to like it.

You want bug fixes, I want features. Well, really I want both. I think that many of the major bugs have been taken care of. I know that there are bugs that are really annoying to some of you, but all in all for the casual users, it is pretty stable. These people really don't care about the fact that island owners can'd deed this, or that. Or care that if you do this step followed by this step in a code, it crashes. What they want is "stuff to do." I know that the bugs limit that, but the casual user does not see that. They want things like cars, planes, and games. It all comes down to balance of bugs and features. I still think that LL is do a good job on that front.

I also think that SL2 is being talked about, but it is aways off. Is SL2 not just SL 2.0? If I am wrong correct me.

Dnate, at this time I am going to stop discussing this matter with you, for as I've mentioned to you in the past, it's a waste of my time when you ignore already existing facts. You can accept this or reject it as you wish. Your personal opinions of these matters have no bearing on the reality of the situation. Sorry, don't mean to be rude, but I've spent anough time messing with you on this.

Show me where LL says you OWN THE HARDWARE. If you are really buying the hardware, then you should be able to take said hardware home with you. Or at least get it shipped to you. You are buying the SIM, not the hardware it runs on. Just because you may have not understood what you were getting into does not make it LL fault. You come in here and accuse LL of fraud, and yet you produce no evidence of it. You say you have all this data, but yet, you never produce it. Until you produce this evidence, I am not going to believe you over LL.