Time to start doing updates at night??? - cross-post

[Cross-post in the General discussion. apologies, but i wanted to make sure the Linden Family sees it.]

Dear Lindens,

First let me say that i absolutely love SL. I spend a lot of time here, and appreciate all the hard work you put into creating, maintaining and improving our world.

I'm very happy to see the rapid growth of our world population. Many new people continue to join SL. We are now at an amazing 160,000 members [and will soon be 200K]. And i find that 90% of the people here are great, interesting and fun to be with.

My question is:


Perhaps it's time to start doing updates at night? [As in "early morning"...]


If you do updates in the wee hours, then 25 people, and maybe a few hundred more avatars are inconvenienced.

If updates continue to be done in the middle of the day, then 160,000 people are inconvenienced. Think about it...

Cheers,
Glenn

"night" and "morning" are relative to were players live. What's a convient nighttime update for some is a huge pain for others.

I think it's more feasible for Linden to look at their useage stats and update during a time when the number or online players is usually at its lowest. Hopefully, they'd inconvience the least number of people that way.

While we're waiting for the grid to come back online, why don't we all take a break and go outside or something? (yes, I *am* being a hypocrite =P )

Perfect time, as most US/Canadian players will be at work, and Lindens are at work.

If a night, maybe nice for you, but bad for LL and bad for players in other parts of the world. So I think it is the best possible time it could be.

As I already said in the other post, whatever time you pick is going to irritate players in a different part of the world.

As a UK player, I get home from work at 6pm and the grid won't be back up until at least 8.30pm, meaning half of my evening potential game time is gone.

I actually don't understand why it should take 8 hours to update a simple client patch. It's not as if any in game data is being modified, only our client that accesses it. That shouldn't take more than an hour or two.

I'm sure a Linden somewhere could 'correct' me, but it just seems an incredibly inefficient system to me. The suggestion that they all start work, disappear down the nearest bar and pizza joint, living it up on our monthly fees, then come back at 15 minutes before going home time to press the 'restart grid' button, may not be too far fetched

If only they'd figure out how to patch only the files we need, instead of the 20mb or so every single time (x25,000 players or so over the next day or so) I'm sure that would save a lot of bandwidth, and also reduce the lag once the game does reopen.

Lewis

That and they got lives too dude. They work normal office hours and probably have people on cold-call if something screws up like all companies do. No way they could work 24/7, would make you sick

You are incorrect.

More than the client is being updated. The software that runs on the machines that the client connects to is also being updated; there are rather a lot of such machines.