Suspending new accounts until problems worked out?

Serious question. Has Linden Lab considered suspending the creation of new accounts until the current issues with grid-wide lag, teleportation hiccups, and presence information are worked out? Ever since we started hitting over 14,000 concurrent users the mainland has been consistently difficult to navigate, the Friends list has been showing everone who was already on before you as being offline, some sims are experiencing There.com-bad prim and avatar rezzing times upon login/teleportation, and most recently, teleports seem to have about a 1-in-3 chance of completing. I saw something in one of the Linden Blog posts about SL's network connection being 'saturated.' That really doesn't sound too good.

I know Linden Lab is aware of these problems and trying to figure out solutions, but literally thousands of new accounts are being created every day and the situation's only growing worse. All these poor newbies are seeing Second Life at its worst in terms of performance and stability. That doesn't seem like the impression you'd want to give a new user... and of course everyone who's been around for more than a couple months is missing the days when TPs weren't a crapshoot, and in many cases you could port into a zone and actually see all the people and objects in the vicinity, even if the textures weren't fully loaded yet.

Temporarily blocking the creation of new accounts would keep these issues from compounding while Linden Lab scrambled to identify bottlenecks and build up the infrastructure. This sort of thing isn't unprecedented. When World of Warcraft sold out sooner than expected and new players flooded the servers, Blizzard stopped distributing copies of the game for two months while they set up new servers and bulked up their networking infrastructure. While at the time it was frustrating to latecomers who wanted to play, at over 7,000,000 active customers today, the move doesn't seem to have hurt their business any. Had Blizzard NOT effectively kept new players from signing up in the interim, the bad first impressions of players forced immediately into server queues or thrown onto overpopulated servers that couldn't handle the load WOULD have lost them customers and hindered their growth.

So, back to the question: Is putting a temporary halt to population growth something that's currently on the table?

I often think about things like this when I have mounds of email flooding in and all the replies I have to make!

Things are getting better right now — still issues, but more manageable than the time you wrote this.

Re: turning off new registrations, the idea's been discussed before, but not something we're currently doing. IIRC, there's been at least one time where we turned off new registrations; so I believe, in relation to what you elaborated, there has been some historical basis.

It'll continue to be considered in the future.