LL's Obsession with Concurrency Figures

When will LL finally wake up and admit that at the moment they are incapable of supporting over 70k online at once.

It's about time someone in charge realised that a working grid is more important to us than the concurrency figures they like to throw at us and pat themselves on the back with.

I wish someone with the authority would have the bottle to say "enough is enough" and remove traffic as it currently operates. Yes they would lose 15-20k of their concurrency figures but at least we may finally get just one day when the whole grid didn't crumble.

Please LL....stop this nonesense and do what is right for once!!!!!

(yes I know they won't read this but venting is all I can do as once again logins are disabled).

LL are obsessed with concurrency because a bigger audience makes SL more attractive to content providers.

Need to update the rant template, folks - it's now 80k when things get really broken.

Oh, as one person said...



Oh, wait. That was November of 2006.

I suspect they know they're having some troubles. I suspect they're trying to fix 'em, too.

I'm beginning to think that Concurrency numbers are LL's compensation. Much like how guys with really big trucks usually are short stacked below the belt.

RTFBlog

Then maybe you won't get so frustrated.

You sound like the people who just had to have their own home in pristine wilderness and are now pissed off because other people have moved in and ruined your own views. It was ok when you did it i.e. logged into SL and was fine with you but when LL tries to increase capacity, you've got a problem with it.

I am proud to see user concurrency rise. I happen to believe it anit all bots. It is LL's duty to increase capacity as all peoples should get the chance to experience this virtual world. If there are some hiccups along the way, so be it.

Have patience and be grateful you have the opportunity to enjoy SL.

PS: It is not that they are incapable of increasing user concurrency. But, again, if you all would just read the blog....oh nevermind.

You're right, it doesn't look all that bad at all when condensed:

Wednesday, January 7th, 2:58 pm Technicians are investigating issues interfering with some inworld services.
Thursday, January 8th, 1:34 pm Technicians are currently investigating an issue which may interfere with inworld functionality.
Saturday, January 10th, 4:53 pm Technicians are currently investigating an issue which may interfere with inworld functionality. Logins are blocked.
Sunday, January 11th, 11:20 am Due to a sudden overload on our database, we’ll shortly restrict logins.
Monday, January 12th, 5:46 am We were seeing an overload on XML-RPC service requests from particular parties, which had been disabled for a short time to allow us to figure out what was causing this.
Tuesday, January 13th, 3:39 pm Due to a sudden overload on our database, we’ll shortly restrict logins.
Wednesday, January 14th, 3:05 pm Technicians are currently investigating an issue which may interfere with inworld functionality. Logins are blocked
Thursday, January 15th, 1:46 pm Technicians are currently investigating an issue which may interfere with inworld functionality. Logins are blocked.
Friday, January 16th, 11:38 am Logins to Second Life have just been disabled
Friday, January 16th, 5:15 pm Technicians are investigating a database issue which is interfering with several inworld services
Saturday, January 17th, 5:23 pm Technicians are investigating a database issue which may be interfering with several inworld services
Sunday, January 18th, 3:51 pm Logins continue to be intermittent.
Sunday, January 18th, 8:01 pm Logins are blocked.
Monday, January 19th, 11:08 am Logins have been temporarily blocked due to a database issue.

Note well, Friday the 9th had no blogged issues at all.

We used to complain about 50K

And 20k before that.

And before that, we never thought we'd get to 10k without crashing the grid.

*sigh* Thank you Quixotic. Oh and perhaps, if folks know soooo much about maintaining this type of grid...and all technical instruments that go along with it.....and all the variables and all the problems that might be possible with operating such a system.....they should apply at LL and just fix it. I know that's harsh...and I don't mean to belittle anyone's frustration, nor do I assume that everyone who complains has zero knowledge of this sort of thing...... but in my experience with complainers (both in SL and IRL in the work I have done for years)....it's usually those who know the least about an issue, who squeek the loudest when things don't go their way.

That's probably because the blog was down that day.

At one time potential for marketing was probably a driving force in keeping the numbers up. each alleged resident was one more person LL could pimp to the RL companies as a potential victim...customer.

Priceless

It is not "us" that they are throwing those concurrency figures at. Rather it is the new individuals and businesses that they want to entice into SL.

Well, teleports don't work, transactions are timing out and I probably shouldn't rez any no copy items (said like Stepford wife) so maybe I'll go read the blog.

The good news is, my hair is still attached to my head... I think *minimizes this window* Yup. Right where it should be. Huzzah.

People complain for a reason...SL has so many problems and LL chose not to address the serious ones. Reading blogs will not lessen fustrations that are caused from inworld problems experienced by residents. I don't care what the problem is..just fix it. It's a simple fact..LL are providing a service...that service needs to work...it's as simple as that. How would you like it if your car broke down everytime you got in it...not much I would think. LL need to do what is required to make it run smooth and keep up with rising members which means upgrading equipment and do what ever it takes and antisipate rising members numbers.

I hear about so many people saying no to premium membership.... Why pay for fustration...we come here to escape real world fustrations and stress..we sure don't need it here. It's a simple thing..if it's not working, fix it. Duct tape doesn't work for everything. LL are loosing revenue they could have otherwise had from what would have been increasing premium memberships. All the problems with SL are probably not very assuring for new members I would suspect a lot are not staying in SL. If LL want to increase members as potential victims (love the term lol), you would think they would get a clue...

...and yet here we all are, and LL continues to make money.

QFT

Now wouldn't it be nice if at some point they'd use some of that money to stabilize the platform they are making all of that money from?

That made me laugh so hard I shot beer out my nose.

You're dreaming!

The problem is that SL's infrastructure was designed in 2003, around the model that most other online games were using at that time, based on "zones". The problem is that model was designed for games where the designers created the whole world and could rig things so that interest in each zone would be equal. In SL, this didn't apply, so for every overloaded and lagging sim there are 5 or 6 empty, but no way to transfer capacity between sims. Changing the design of the grid to enable that is very hard - none of the other games managed it; all those games had to create completely new sequels to change their server software that much.

Don't you think if it were as "easy" as you seem to make it out to be - "just fix it" - it would have been "fixed" by now?

You don't care what the problem is but nor do you probably have any understanding whatsoever of what it takes to "just fix it." Unless they took the grid down completely for days, which would probably cause a huge uproar, I doubt "just fixing it" is something that is either easy to figure out or easy to implement.

Oh, and the world economy is in shambles... I hope Obama "just fixes it."

lol
i have to say..thats a pretty good example and i am not being sarcastic at all it really is a good one..

But shouldn't 5 or 6 years be plenty of time to get a handle on and perhaps start really addressing the issues that make these sorts of problems so redundant?

I admit I haven't the slightest clue how one would "fix" SL... but I'm not being paid to fix it either. Someone is tho, aren't they?

To me, SL is no better at being a stable platform then it was in 2004. There are lots more bells and whistles, but it still crashes with surprising regularity and has all the stablity of a bowl of Jello (perhaps made from the Kool-Aid they all drink there at the Lab).

Which is a little disappointing, since they've had so long to work on it, don't cha think? Or am I just not being patient enough?

When your primary concern is selling a product rather then ensuring the quality of your product, you're bound to have problems. And I can't help but believe that if LL would be more concerned with their platform's stability, their sales numbers would take care of themselves and not have to be pushed by "artificially inflated" concurrancy numbers.

This. And since MMO's have been brought up, just thought I'd mention - I currently subscribe to one of those games that has an engine created at about the same time as LL's. Yeah it does get laggy from time to time, but it takes about 100 or so players in the zone before it even approaches what we consider 'laggy' in a sim with 40 people in it. Just sayin'...

Ughm, but that makes it ok?

Why is it the rule of law that LL waits till the sytem compeltely crumbles before adding support? Something wrong with staying just a bit ahead of the curve? It's not like this new 80k figure was like out of the blue, numbers hve been spiking up for weeks on the weekends.

If SL were are real service they'd be comfortably 10-15% ahead of expected average weekend numbers.. EVERY WEEKEND. Not this crumble, rebuild, crumble cycle we have to go through every 6 months.

SL needs competition, you wouldn't find Sprint users saying it's ok that they can't make calls on sunday becuase the network is too busy, they'll move to another seervice instead, therefor Sprint HAS to keep up with capacity before it is overwhelmed, as should LL.