Log-In Problems

Ok i am confused, first of all i dont see any thread from Phillip Linden, and second all i dont see anything but the same old crap that was put on there earlier ... but I keep trying and trying and trying ........

Hi,

Sorry for the load and login troubles. We are doing everything we can, and certainly going through some growth pains here. Nothing specific changed in 1.6 that is causing these problems - they are caused by SL's growth and specific types of in-world content that is being created. Here is an overview:

Our database load is suddenly increasing and creating the observed login delays when there are both lots of people in SL and lots of people trying to log in. We don't know why the load is increasing so sharply, and we didn't predict failure at these load levels.

While we are trying to figure out the specific cause of the problems, the next patch (1.6.5) has some changes that MAY provide some temporary help. The big change is an improvement in the efficiency of the way we check email for scripts. There are currently thousands of scripted objects in SL which are checking for email a total of several hundred times per second. This was something that we didn't anticipate - content creators in SL are way overloading the system with these email checks, so we need to redesign for a better approach. Hopefully this will drop overall database login load, because profiling suggests that this call is where the database spends most of it's time.

Looking forward, there are two types of database load we are trying to rapidly fix. The first is inventory, and the second is in-world searches via the finder. Because we have put no limits of inventory, people have staggering amounts (terabytes) of stuff in inventory. The size of the data (again something we didn't anticipate in initial design) is going to force us to rapidly build a distributed system of many database clusters to store everyone's inventory. Right now, the queries that find things in inventory are putting severe load on the database. With respect to in-world (when you type something into the search bar in the find window), we are looking at ways to move this data to a secondary server so that the queries can be made against that server rather than the main database.

We are working as quickly as we can to fix the problems - as you can see from above there isn't a silver bullet or a design error. We are just being stressed to the limit by some systems (scripted objects, inventory, and text searches) that are growing at a rate much more rapid than the growth of the SL user base. Obviously just asking everyone to delete stuff from inventory and not use objects that get email messages from outside SL isn't a sufficient solution - we need to quickly redesign to adapt to the conditions we are seeing.
__________________
Philip Linden
CEO & Founder, Linden Lab
blog: http://secondlife.blogs.com/philip

The size of the data (again something we didn't anticipate in initial design) is going to force us to rapidly build a distributed system of many database clusters to store everyone's inventory.

To show you how concerned the Lindens are over this, I just got an message from a friend who managed to get on after almost four hours of trying. She went to ask live help a question and there is absolutely not one person working live help.

And this on the busiest night of the week.

i understand people's frustration about the login situation. I'm annoyed myself.

But there seems to be so much seething animosity for the Lindens... why? There's always some snarky comment about "Seems like (some minor bug fix) pales in comparison to (problem currently annoying the poster) and they should have fixed that instead!!" Something tells me that the people who post this sort of invective have never worked in software. You have a team of bright people, all working on various parts of the system, and releases are when you get to put fixes in. Hard problems take longer. Would you rather *not* have the fixes that *have* been done, just because some harder problems haven't been fixed yet? If you think that some Head Honcho™ should corrall all the developers into a room and flog them until one particular defect is resolved, then you just don't get it. That's not the way problems are solved. Developers are not some interchangeble unit that you can throw more of at a problem to make it get done faster. In fact, quite the opposite. You put too many poeple on a software problem and it gums up the works, too many cooks in the kitchen.

We all know that Linden Labs is in business to make money, but as far as corps like that go it's pretty freakin' *close* to altruistic, combiined with our community. You've got a bunch of creative people, Lindens or not, who share a vision of doing this really cool thing with a 3D environment. They're not the Empire, folks, they're not out to rip anybody off. There's no secret agenda to bilk the masses. It's just a bunch of people working together to do some neat stuff, and as a side note Linden Labs has money to pay some developers and other people to do that stuff. Many in the user community make money as well, and many more just have fun doing cool stuff.

The system gets progressively better with time. Sure, some things don't work as well as people would like, and sometimes things are out and out busted. But the get fixed, new features are added, and in the long run we're all able to gather in a pretty cool place and do some pretty cool stuff. So just chill out, eh?