Another "slight database hiccup"?

Seems to me that the population of SL has gotten too big for the infrastructure.

There were lots of problems after LL threw open the floodgates, but the concurrency numbers grew like crazy as well.

Concurrency has been relatively flat for the past few months I think and we still have more problems now then ever before.

This seems more like a fundamental design flaw in the grid's infrastructure than anything else. If it was fixable by throwing more servers at the problem, they would have done that by now.

I realize that there will be glitches and SL is new technology and all, but this is one of the biggest things that will prevent SL from ever becoming more than a Game, if they don't get it fixed. People make plans for events, some that are very important to them. But if they can't be reasonably assured those evnts will be able to go on, why should they bother trying to make any sort of "Life"?

First of all, they dropped the price of private islands, and 3400 new ones were sold in May 2008, which is a 23% increase. So that huge jump in one month probably added load to the system. I think they need a couple of drastic steps. Duplicate the asset and other backend databases, and put one copy at each co-location place that houses the sim servers. Once you have a reasonable level of backup, and ability to support the load, put in a plan to grow the back end in step with the growth of the map and player population.

Rolling restarts seem to put extra load on the system. My theory is the first time a person visits a sim after a restart, it has to fetch all the textures and animations from the asset database, but after that, it stores that stuff locally and doesnt have to go get it again each time another person visits.

So, have a rolling restart right before the afternoon peak time on a weekend, and you are just begging to overload the system. Until the asset cluster can be grown to handle it, whats needed is to split a rolling restart into 4 or 5 days, and do each piece as you are heading into the evening, so you have all night to do first time loading, before the peak the following afternoon.

@28 Brenda - and its also hard to run a business when a large percentage of sales fail to execute properly. Since Paypal charges $0.30 plus a percentage to recieive money, SL could be an alternate way to pay for small items (under about $2) in the great big world outside SL itself. That would be possible *IF* it was reliable, but it just isnt right now.