did you read the blog recently...

I said non-camp/traffic bots..

oops sorry

My guess is because group IM's are a resource hog. As it is currently, if you wish to initiate a chat with a group, the chat module has to "find" each group member in whichever region they are connected to. Each time you send a message...

Hehe. I only need one decent reason to quit completely. I've said a number of times lately that I'm thoroughly bored with it. I only go in for 2 reasons: one is to deal with customer problems (the thing that this thread is about), and the other is to chat with one particular person. The second reason can be done elsewhere. The only reason I stay at all is because it would be silly to turn my back on the money.

I'll take a wild guess .

[wild guess]
LL's back-end services are a crazy interconnected mess where one service either stresses an entirely different and unrelated service, or even worse there's a single shared component that everything else relies on and when it becomes overloaded everything else that relies on it breaks as well.

(Guess is based on the fact that when things get bad, pretty much everything breaks... whether it's logging on, inventory, assets, presence, transactions, transaction history, tp'ing, (old) search, offline IMs, online IMs, groups, etc. If things weren't badly interconnected or having one single point of failure then only one single service would break while the rest continues working)

LL's solutions so far have been about either removing features (ratings, sim visibility, revamping group chat which they delayed) or crippling them (taking the live transaction history out of the viewer and having the site history based on an offline snapshot).

We know they can already turn selected portions of search off during high load (they disabled search / places, popular places and people in the past) so that wouldn't be new. I don't think they've ever turned off groups though, which might have been what the test was about (they have pointed out that groups and starting group chat are "costly" and we have that to look forward to.

(Or they're planning to look up profiles / groups / about land from a cache like transactions are now rather than live data)
[/wild guess]

(Random: putting "wild guess" and "/wild guess" in < > brackets breaks the posting page )

A year ago, the doomsday plan was to throttle logins.

This year, it's "load mitigation".

"load mitigation"" ??
In English: Reduce the load

One way of doing that would be login throttling. That would leave full functionality available to those logged in.
It seems LL don't want to do that, and I can understand why they would not want to.

The alternative is to reduce functionality for everyone.

As others have mentioned Group messaging makes the grid work hard.
Friends back end seems to be lacking robustness. How many times has Friends Online been removed from the website?
I'm not at all surprised to see "???" where a group owns land.
I'm not at all surprised to see "???" in the Friends List

The bit they turned off for 30 minutes is the bit that seems to me to be an early indicator of server and internal bandwidth issues.

Another very useful facility that indicates grid problems is Map.
I'm not at all surprised when the map becomes useless and gray.
There's a lot of information on the map, particularly when you zoom out.
Dots moving in real time. That always impresses the hell out of me.


I think the "tests" are simply to see what the effect of turning off services will be on overall grid performance. They are not testing some new improvement.
For all we know, they have already (stealth) tested the effect of turning off parts of Map and Friends. It certainly feels like that sometimes.
They had to warn us about the Group "test" as everyone would have noticed.


They won't limit logins, so the only other way to "mitigate load" is to turn features off.


They have blogged that they are installing more servers.
One hopes that they are also throwing money at bandwidth and network monitoring.

Hopefully the throttling back of services makes it so transactions don't break.

Since this one is the real killer. I once had someone pay me 2700 Lindens trying to receive a 300 Linden Item during one of these times,

I refunded her money of course - But still for merchants far busier than me this could be a nightmare.

Yes. This is why they would be forced to do "something".
Failed transactions were becoming a daily feature.
People might put up with failed TPs and group problems. If the transactions continued to fail, that would have been a total killer.


It's a race.
In the time it takes to get the infrastructure beefed up and bedded in, can they turn off enough services in order to keep transactions flowing at peak times?
Meanwhile , I assume that they are merrily accepting new signups as fast as they come.

Hmm so if bot consume little or no resourses, then if nobody eevr logged out of SL the grid would still be fine on weekends?

That is indeed the question. Speculation is that the grid would be just fine if everybody acted like a trafficbot: motionless in a box, Ruthed and gray and silent.

But that's a little kinky, even for the weekend.

I shouldn't have mentioned the network.
If you don't talk about things, they don't happen.

Sling, damn you and you big mouth!

Must be me but I fail to see the connection between what I said and you question once more
If you think bots do consume more resources, then I would love to hear your arguments for that. Just remember I am not trying to prove you wrong here, but I am trying to get a better grip on how things work. And as long as I don't see any good arguments, I do think that my explanation is as least as good as any.

Greetings Marcel

Bots may consume less resourses, I said it.
BUT seeing there's so many of the damn things that are purely just traffic tokens, wouldn't be a damn sight easier on the grid if LL set it up so we could replace campers with a scripted prim cube that just adjusts the land traffic to how ever much you feel like cheating the system. Better yet just allow people to enter their own traffic figures, sounds 100% fair to me and a lot less laggier.
Traffic might as well be worked out by the number of plywood cubes you can rez for all the relevance it has now..........
Yeah, "oh joy a bot uses less resources then 10 AV's so I can run 90 of them."
I can imagine all the bots autorelogging now pounding on the grid login server tto get in, wonder if LL have ever had 20k trying to login in the same 15 seconds before.

Maybe LL should just sell traffic bonuses

+5K traffic = 1000L a week
+50K traffic = 5000L a week
+100K Traffic = 7500L a week
"Top off traffic" = 10000L a week

would make a good money sink and no one would need campers or bots.

This reminds me of something I've kinda wondered. I've posted many times that I think Traffic is just a totally counterproductive anachronism for ranking Search, even if the metric weren't gamed to the point of being meaningless. But if one fabricates Traffic--either with the "pay-for-traffic bonus" idea or with bots/campers--then how do such businesses know what "real" Traffic they're getting? I can think of two ways: one would be to somehow factor-out the fake traffic from the parcel Traffic metrics, and try to use the remainder (this seems almost certain to be full of noise, especially now when getting and staying in-world is so problematic). The other would be to collect one's own statistics with scripted "visitor counters"--maybe collecting demographics and other data in the process and shipping it off to a web-served database. Just curious what people actually do.

Well as I see it, the amount of bots was nothing higher then the amount of users still logged in when they shut down new logins.
I could see my 2 posing avatars (bots) happily logged in, and I guess they goes for every bot that doesn't actually move. As long as there is no sim restart, they stay where they are. Together with people that either never log out, or that didn't want to log out because they could not get back in, around 17k was on the grid.

Let's say 15k of that are bots. Still makes 45k of regular users on peak hours. Where as when I started SL not so long ago, about 9 months ago, the max was around 40k (including bots). So we can conclude a rise of active users from this. And again, I still think the amount of active users are the cause of borking asset servers. And THAT was what the topic was about originally

Nevertheless, banning traffic would have my blessing. It doesn't say anything about popularity anyway at the moment.
When I search for my most important keywords (sculpted furniture), I get on 3th place in Search All. Pretty good result, and very valid, as I do sell sculpted furniture.
When I search at Places, I am at about 10 or 12 (not inworld at the moment), the first 4 results are having 5 figures traffic. Where i have about 3200. My calculations say that adding 20 bots will put me in the top three there as well. But as you see its not relevant at all, since its only related to the high traffic.
When I search at Classifieds, I am at 7 or so. Because I payed 1250 for my classified. Again a valid result, paying more will get me higher. That is how classfieds are supposed to work.

Banning traffic would get me still on 3 in Search All, still on 7 in Classifieds, and probably at 3 as well in Places. So banning traffic would do me good. As well as the people searching for sculpted furniture. Where with traffic, I am only tempted to fire up 20 Sleek clients and enjoy the extra visitors because of the higher results, though I don't do it.

And don't make yourself any illusions on the people declaring not to buy at false traffic stores: The majority doesn't give a damn. They search and visit the first store that comes in view. That is why for example Phil keeps running his botfarm. The people find him first and buy there. He gets to cash out every month. And as for me, I can pretty well understand that motivation.

Conclusion: Mass vote Jira's for banning of traffic in search. Maybe it helps.

Well my 2 posing bots were logged out by an administrator No one inside but Lindens now... let's hope they find the cause because this long downtime sucks. From the blog:

[10:11 AM] We are still trying to put our fingers down on the cause for the problem, please bear with us a while longer! We apologize again for this interruption of your weekend plans!

I am picturing everyone at Linden Labs running around entering code yelling things back and forth, people swigging coffee and meeting out back for chain smoking and brain storming trying to get the grid back up. People hurriedly running back and forth screaming "The Grid is Down!!!!" as a calm computer generated voice (I picture female) announces "The Grid is Down, the Second Life Grid is down" The they stare intently at computer screens large ones on the wall to see if there is a change... When there is and it is back up...the whole room with cheer, breath a sigh of relief and continue with business as usual....


I think I watched the movies War Games, 2001 & 2010 way to many times...lol

Except for one really geeky looking guy, who sits at a console away from everyone else, who is busy crunching numbers, shaking his head and muttering,"This just isn't right. Somethings doesn't add up". But the sound of cheers and the popping of champagne corks drowns him out.

I forgot about that part...

Interesting observation, Marcel. All of mine stayed in through it all, until everyone was forced out. Personally, I doubt that 15k of the 17k were bots, but we can only guess.

I was tempted to post a reply when someone thought that 20k bots were all trying to log back in, and I knew that mine were still in so all the others were likely to still be in, but I thought better of it At least your observation is evidence that the number of bots estimates that are sometimes made in this forum are way too high - not conclusive, but much more in line with the most likely reality.

There is no doubt in my mind about that. It's the only thing that makes any sense.