how well should the website perform ?

Let me phrase my question a bit more precisely: How long should one wait, within reason, for a high quality website identical to this one to: login, logout, login to the Lindex, and perform other common website activities ?

I'm not in IT, so I don't know what to expect within reason. I'm thinking it's probably unfair to compare http://secondlife.com to http://www.google.com or http://www.yahoo.com. I try to be quite patient with the website, because I know the performance varies due to load conditions.

Yet... I'm thinking that perhaps, the website could do better ? If it would take a huge investment in hardware and bandwidth to improve the website, then perhaps I should be satisfied with current performance. Second Life and LL continually remind me to be patient and to learn patience.

be glad this dump is up in the first place and forget how laggy it is

Part of the answer is going to depend on your connection speed, and such. But that said, I've seen some studies which indicate that the average person will wait approximately 15 seconds for a page to load before they decide to move on.

The main site has links to the grid I believe, as in hosted in the same place, which explains why when inworld is borky so is the webstie.

The blog I believe is hosted elsewhere and doesn't suffer the same issues of being borky when the grid in borky.

So to answer your question, the setup here isn't standard.

See http://www.uie.com/articles/download_time/ for an interesting take on the issue. It's old, but the points are still applicable.

Also see http://www.useit.com/papers/responsetime.html . Nielsen is a well-known minimalist, so take it with a grain of salt.

I think the website is no longer hosted on a system that has anything to do with the grid but is hosted on Amazon.

The blog won't load at all for me at them moment.

No, if I'm not mistaken, only the client downloads are hosted at Amazon S3.

As far as the website itself -- it's a website, for God's sake. This is not experimental technology. I think it's ridiculous for it to not be up to the 99.999% uptime that a typical commercial website meets.

P2

The website must be a very low-priority item to LL. Go to the events page (http://secondlife.com/events/) and try to use the popup menu to filter the categories. It hasn't worked for over a month. A mentor submitted a ticket on it and was told the problem had been fixed, but that was not accurate.

Granted, fixing that page is not the most important issue for LL to be working on /understatement. And it's function is duplicated by the in-world Search > Events feature, which still works. But when you consider that such a problem should take a mere few minutes to fix (unless LL is doing some wacky html stuff with this popup menu), and that many of us used to use that page, especially to browse the available education events, letting such a simple problem remain embarrassingly broken for such a long time shows that the site must not be important to LL. For a company involved in technology to let something like this go is akin to a landscaping company failing to mow the lawn in front of their headquarters.

btw, after my friend got the response on the ticket, I submitted the issue on JIRA:
https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/WEB-575

Merely from a user standpoint, I start getting antsy if something takes more than 30 seconds on the intertubes.

To be honest though, I've always found this website to be fairly well constructed. I've encountered plenty of websites that make it nigh on impossible to find the information you want no matter how hard you look. I've lost count of the number of companies that have lost my business to a competitor just because their website took longer to navigate than said competitors.

As for the website having links to the grid - this isn't really my area of expertise; being a software engineer in training, most of my studies are concerned with design issues and the engineering process. The site would not be hosted on the same server as the grid - it would be hosted on a separate web server, probably running a PHP program or simillar object oriented system to access data from the database via SQL queries. I think. The grid, afterall, is just a database. The client turns that data into the world we see when we log on. It's really no more complicated than running an internet banking website, or a travel agents website that allows customers to register and pay for their holiday online. The principles are the same.

The blog still failed to load as a few minutes ago on my system.

I cleared the web browser cache and delteted cookies for secondlife.com and it worked again. Perhaps a good thing to do when one has troubles with secondlife.com. I don't notice this problem at other websites.

I can't find anything yet as to what all is hosted on Amazon,but the blog is hosted by Wordpress. The Second Life blog uses WordPress VIP service. This is probably why the blog totally fails so often while the forums just work very badly at times.