Possible causes for database problems?

I am no tech guru, and I dont know what LL uses for database software, but here is what I think is causing these slowdowns in performance:
-Griefer accounts! there are 7,000,000 inactive accounts! there should be a purge system for these accounts to free up names and lessen the load on the database
-Massive amounts of random groups, these can get confusing to database software
-People placing tons of spaces, random characters and symbols in their pllaces names, these can confuse the software, and possibly increase the file size of the database, including making it work harder to read, increasing load

If you got any other ideas on what is causing these, please post them, lets stop complaining and try and help LL, and if they already know, hey its better than nothing

Ummm... are you in management?

im just a guy who has worked with databases before, and managed different forums, and I have even stress tested database systems, just suggesting to LL what I think could be causing the bad problems. I think the longest I ever had a forum take to read the MySQL database was around 10 minutes, to just get the forum information

oh yea, lets remove the forums

dunno if u know it so i`ll share u a secret
sl is multi layerd and if anything in the chain snaps, even a borked network cable, half the grid is disconnected

just by posting here and having ur account active and inword, u contribute more then the 50k inactive accounts

weird that on my island i have 0! problems, instant rez, no db issues, no lag, can tp any where and even hitting delete on a prim removes it instantly

now when u get back from university, u can advice LL on how not to confuse the poor old servers with ascii characters

besides, whines belowngs in general spam™ with the other 719²

I think LL uses multiple database servers, and a central database server to store things like groups and land plots, avatars, etc, stuff thats general, while more server specific stuff, such as objects, and their positions, are stores on sim database servers. Could be multiple databases to split the load, but with the growth SL has had... they need a redesign or more servers. I remember back in december and january, when the user count was 1,000,000-2,000,000 the databases were not having problems as much as today

Almost forgot! Also look at when they restarted the groups and land searches... 4 hours ago. This is VERY recent to the problems that are happening, and SL was fine when they were disabled, so it is most likely a problem with what database server those are stored in.

if you have access to the user db why dont you know what it runs

and besides unless they are being used its just storage space and not load... it could slow down query's but for some odd reason i have faith that linden labs has a competent indexing system in place where the most used data is the most readly available, therefore dead accounts are in the bottom and are only searched when needed

Also theres more than one database, the website uses one, the blogs use another, jira is yet another one, userdata is one, inventory is one, and probally inworld objects are on yet another one



groups probally are on their own system
computers dont get confused, they run instructions, litterly billions of them per seconds

if your group name takes up 6 or 128 bytes of information is little difference, and they are restricted for a reason, make a group name that takes up 16 megabytes we will talk



mismanagement of linden labs hard assets, and the inability to restructure without downing the grid for extended periods of time

I dont have access to the user DB, and I do know it uses more than one database, using one database would be suicide for all the columns it uses! there are so many things to process, it is a little insane. Now I do know larger forums tend to slow down when user counts and post counts go overboard, now this forum is doing very well for itself :: claps for LL For making the forum stable :: this shows they know what they are doing when it comes to databases. While the user database is the SAME for SL and the website, there are many many other databases. Hundreds of thousands instructions are processed but networks have their limits, and software can make mistakes. Plus searches happen very frequently, therefore it most likely searches by date of creation to find things. This is all assumption, I would really like to get an LL employee in here to clarify what exactly SL runs like, and give us some information on the databases that seem to be daisychained together

The 1000 odd Landbots are in a feeding frenzy on all the ex Casino land

LOL

I am sure you have a good understanding of "Forum" databases and even a good grasp of technical terms but I suggest maybe you could just let the guys an gals at Linden deal with it as they actually know how it works rather than speculation..

what I like to see the statas on tis one. 7,000,000 inactive are yoou pushing the trurth here. I dont`t or highly doubt this.

Or so you would hope.

I joined SL in november last year. Around 1 million people were registered at that time. When more than 15.000 users were online, SL went down very fast, The lag was terrible. SL improved a lot in the last 6 month. The problems we are seeing now are less frequent than in december. In fact.... SL works A LOT better now, even with 8 million subscribed users, and 40k+ users online.

You can find some interesting articles about the scaling problems in the blog:

"inventory size is not a source of the problems you have been seeing"
http://blog.secondlife.com/2007/05/02/cory-linden-town-hall/

"Regarding free users, they really aren’t too much of a technical load."
http://blog.secondlife.com/2006/12/20/town-hall-with-cory-introductory-transcript/

Meni
knowledgebase and blog junkie

I consider people who havent logged in within 60 days dead accounts, and the registered users are around 8,600,000 last I checked, and the ones that logged in within the last 60 days were like 1,700,000

EDIT: Also, about how SL performance has changed since dec 2006, I agree it had its problems back then, and has improved on those, but those problems were different than the current ones. the MOST i remember back then were probably issues dealing with client FPS (what most on SL refer to as Lag, be it improper use for the term by definition), Sim stability, Sim Performance (SimFPS and its handing of scripts) and the ever so lovely invisible water glitch after teleport. Now these were mainly system and programming faults, not database issues like we see today.

MySQL is good for message boards. That's it.
Don't beleive me? Look at all the issues surrounding SecondLife's databases...

Funny thing you say that. I heared about SL using a pumped and jacked (heavily modified) version of MySQL as their database severs, I REALLY hope they changed it, because that would have been perfectly fine for the SL that was small, but now that its huge, it would most definately overload it

Here's a link to their annoncement for upgrading to mySQL v5 and how it will fix issues around:

Inventory loss
Friend lists
Find
Teleport Failures

Almost all the same problems which have been occuring all weekend.

http://blog.secondlife.com/2007/05/02/cory-linden-town-hall/

uh....bump... :3

Poor LL, MySQL has a tenedancy to overload when it gets full. I remember I made an oopsie in website design where one of my PHP scripts put a loop of information into the MySQL server, and it would keep doing it over and over and over, it filled up the server so much that within a day the whole site was roughly running like crap. Page generation time was in the 10-20 minute range, and it was all because I made a mistake in the database stuff. I found the problem, fixed the typo >.> and then cleared the now huge database out of all the useless info (that sucked!) and the site was back to running perfectly. I hope LL now plans to not use MySQL, and use something more stable, like A CUSTOM DATABASE! I am sure Google could do something to help LL, if LL would want to spend some profits to pay Google to make them a stable database. I think its Google that has the record for the largest most stable database software that they designed themselves for all their stuff.

YEA! MYSQL sucks becuse you wrote a feedback lopp mutiplying your database exponentially each script cycle

its all becuase your code was sucking down the cpu cycles as it rewrote a 3kb database into a 3gb database in 10 min

linden labs did have their own house brand database, and it sucked worse and worse when the usage grew, so they went with something proven to handle the load

now if they implemented it correct or not is a totally different question

also if you apply for google data management they clearly say
"SQL experience a plus, MySQL a plusplus."

so while they may not be using exactly mysql they are using software based on mysql with house brand modifications

That too high of a assumption....and is not possible. Remember that students, people gt ill, or have other RL problems that provents them from logging on. Many others that play here don`t play on a reg bases. I would set the number at between 1 to 2 million. This does not incuded those that abuse money trees and use them for 30 days and dump the accounts. The i feel is the main source of unused accounts.

So I wonder if you died, how many years it would take to declare your account dead?
What if you wanted to log in again after reincarnation..........

This seems to happen every couple months. I think the issue might be volume. Virtually everything you do has something to do with the database, as it's how everything is indexed. With 25-45k people logged on creating stuff, editing stuff, posting ads, adding people to groups, creating landmarks, etc. I think the database might get muddied up a bit and needs a good re-indexing.. I'm totally just guessing as I'm no expert on how databases are re-indexed, and how often they do that. Also, it could be because of a change they've made in the client and/or server software that creates a slowdown over time. This paticular one has been long for them to fix.. but it finally seems to be coming out of the funk.

If you pass away in rl. First off if you have payment on Credit or etc. Would cause you to gt a email saying you having problems payment. After awhile llabs might just notice that the member nolonger is alive from the report the account of CREDIT CARD has been cancelled.

I resenty have a friend that partner died in rl, and her account is now being frozen until her family is noticed because it involves other matters.