That's it I give up!

This latest client (1.15) is another step down in a steady decline of client performance.

It's to the point that SL is pretty much unplayable and unenjoyable.

My computer is well above the minimum specifications.
CPU: AMD-64 3500+ (2211 Mhz)
Memory: 1024 MB
Graphics Card: GeForce 6800 GT (X2 SLI mode)

Fact is this time last year I had no complaints. SL was beutiful in and ran fast at 1024x1280 and all the client graphics settings maximum.

About midway through the First Look beta I was getting 30+FPS in a crowded Welcome Area.

I am lucky to get 15FPS in an empty sim now.

But don't let a silly thing like client performace pull you away from the really important task of adding something as inaine as voice chat to the client. It's not like there isn't a hundred voice chat apps out there already that are small and can be ran along side SL.

I am so tired of this that I am going back to THERE.COM for a while!

We need more enhancements like voice chat, blurry fonts and flapping folders! That will take our minds away from why we are really in Second Life.

Copy/paste from the blog at 9:31 pm SL time today:

"[UPDATE] Various reports of…
Thursday, April 26th, 2007 at 5:46 PM PDT by: michaellinden
[UPDATE 9:25 PM] Charity and I found and fixed one cause of vending machines and llEmail failing. We’re aware there are still problems. The problem is usually with in-world objects that receive email. In general, sending llEmail is not affected and newly created/rezzed objects are not affected. In some cases, restarting the server of the affected region can address the problem. We’re still working on it. I’m sorry it’s still broken. James Linden

[UPDATE 6:19PM] The problem is not related just to email. We are experiencing continued login issues, the friends list loading slow and IMs and are not always successful after a teleport. There may also be issues with group IMs failing and the map not updating as quick as it should. We have a operations working on it and it should be all resolved soon. We’ll keep everyone updated as it develops. Thanks! - Chadrick Linden

[5:44pm] — Linden Lab has received reports of trouble with e-mails between scripts, and from scripts to outside of Second Life — all using the llEmail function. The engineers are looking into it; if there is a problem, we’ll fix it as soon as possible! — Michael Linden"

It looks like this fantastic new 1.15 viewer our "Gods" have bestowed upon us is causing some huge headaches for those poor Lindens tasked with trying to figure out what the hell is the problem. Looks to me like the platform is coming apart at the seams...........but what do you expect when you get "features" instead of fixes?

I think Linden Labs is heading straight for a big wall that they cannot avoid........the whole thing is crashing down around them. And it's happening pretty fast too.

I'm this close to QUITTING and REQUESTING A REFUND. I know many others are too.

Why don't we focus on the bugs not shiny.....

While I understand that a new version can bring bugs with it, it is very frustrating to see how there are no more solutions. I have three friends ( and I am sure there are much more) that have not been able to play since the update. One of them has a voodoo gaming pc... less then 2 months old, those are made to take games way way more intensive then SL can ever dream of being... when she logs in her whole scree turns into a purpelish color and she will crash 2 to 10 minutes later.
Another friends never gets beyond the log in screen while loading it crashes him to desktop... he also has a pc that can take way more then SL needs, and lat but not least the same problem with another friend.

And everywhere you go, any SL related page you will have masses of people who can no longer play properly... and yet nothing happens, you go on and post you have resolved things, if problems with website and log in where resolved... my friends would be playing no?

And all those other people that literally beg you to fix it.

I can tell you one thing, the day I am hit by such a problem is the day I will cancel my account, ok maybe 700 dollars tier isn't enough to be provided with decent service, but your customer service... is almost an insult to the customer. The best.. if there is an reaction at all is we appreciate your patience we are working on it.
Can you at least stop saying that... it just is like waving the red flag in front of a bull... makes him even madder. My patience is over and that sentences just wants to make me smash my head into the screen -_-

For now I'll be playing WoW or LotrO... they at least know how to keep their servers up and running in a decent manner

What is frustrating is the fact that it is all the old bugs with new improved bugs

Bugs happen. Get over it. It'll get fixed.

If you can't handle being here, then leave for awhile. Come back when your blood pressure can handle it.

I just love these invititations to leave And I love how confident some are that everything will get fixed........I'm sure they will, eventually. But when they finally do get fixed there are a dozen more that result in the same problems..........and that is mostly due to introductions of new "features" before the other "features" have been debugged. The result is simple....the problem is still there. So even if the orginal bug is fixed the following "features" related to that bugged part are failing now.......see where I'm heading?

You can not build something on an unstable foundation. SL's foundation is not strong enough to handle anything new. It needs rebuilt BEFORE anything new is added.

Cutting edge? Yeah..........the idea is. But is the platform? Well, it don't work very well so I'll let you guess at my answer.

Developers aren't all in one camp. They don't all work on the same things.

Some work on the comm protocols, others work on the server code, others work on the asset code, others work on the client. Others are researching new features and improvements.

All of these areas need to be continually evolving in order for Second Life to continue. Yes, this includes bug fixing. The guys who put the bugs in are working to fix them. But you can only go so fast. You can't just say "stop new development" and expect those guys to jump right on helping out the ones who are putting out fires now. It doesn't work that way. Adding more people actually reduces overal efficiency and increases likelihood of more bugs. The "Too many cooks in the kitchen" mantra holds true.

They are working on it. Second Life is growing at a huge pace. They've done remarkably well to, within the course of a year, have the world scale at (at least) a 500% increase.

Yes, things broke. Yes, some mistakes were made. Yes, things would be done differently knowing what they know now. But that's not life. You used the phrase "cutting edge" and you are right. Missteps made a year ago are biting us all now. But they take time to fix.

And there is no focal point at the top of this hierachy? Is there not a group responsible somewhere for meshing this giant indeavor so it all fits and works in the end? If not there should be...........it doesn't matter who screwed up in the code, network, or development. If the product is broken then it needs to be fixed. Everyone doing their own thing without some coordination will never be efficient.............so maybe fewer people are needed. But people willing to help out where ever the problems are.

"Oh........did you hear Joe coder made a mistake in version 1.1 that is screwing up my new feature in 1.5. Man that guy needs to fix it soon because I got a new feature coming out in 1.6 that depends on that bug in 1.1 being resolved..........I guess he won't be at the party tonight, huh?"

That is the picture you just painted in my head.......and I actually believe it to be true. Attitudes like that and the lack of cooperation among divisions within companies have brought down many "inovative businesses". The ones who don't have that lack of coordination most always succeed. Maybe the tech field needs a new organizational rebuild.

I believe this all falls under Cory's domain. There have been townhalls a few times in the past explaining what's going on behinds the scenes, such as the switch away from UDP to TCP/IP and investigation into Mono to alleviate sim strain. These were nice since they exposed some of the "guts."

There hasn't been any of these events recently.

And why is that? Covered up with problems maybe?

Got a bug in 1.5 which winds up being caused by a mistake made in 1.3 which was made because 1.2 had a bug relating back to 1.1 which really originated because something amiss in the original code? Hmmmm..............now we have a bug that has it's roots way back at the beginning and we have to wait til Joe Coder fixes his bug in 1.3 which leads back to having to get Suzi Coder working on her bug that leads back to Joe's current bug he's grinding away at while everyone else goes home for the weekend?

That's an avalance caused by not fixing things that are broke before moving ahead in development. By the time everything gets fixed back to the original mistake all the new stuff built that were patched or worked around to overcome the single problem back in day one all fail now.........and you start all over.

Brilliant..................LOL.

Job security, maybe............I don't know.

It doesnt matter if not a thing in SL works right for YOU... I'm just fine. (A typical attitude). Why should extremely shoddy performance be 'gotten over"?

An astonishing number of people have valid concerns. Usability problems should be fixed before introducing the next GEE-WHIZ UBER COOL (unworkable probably) feature.

Ought to be more of the PPPPPP, Prior Planning Prevents P*** Poor Performance factor getting things that need to be fixed - fixed, and less worries about trivial stuff like voice chat etc.

The point isn't to accept that bugs exist and never to fix them. The method is to catalog the bugs that are found and rank them according to immediacy.

If a bug is causing widespread problems or denial of core service, it gets a higher priority than a bug that caused water to not appear with certain graphics cards.

Obviously, a new feature will be delayed until the core bug is resolved. If the new feature is that important, the bug standing in the way of its implementation will be moved to a higher priority.

Two problems there.

First............that ain't obvious at all. LOL

Second. How do you catagorize bugs and how they will effect development? You have known issues outstanding low on the list and then you introduce a mandatory update which crashes half the population........due the number 10,021 on the list. So that so called lowly nousance bug that has been hanging around for 2 years suddenly gets booted to the top. And the whole list gets revamped..........that makes sense, I guess if you are chaotically natured. But why not fix it when it gets noticed? Oh yeah, you told me that it just doesn't work that way........sorry, I forgot.

My saying that wasn't meant to brush people's legit concerns over. I'm frustrated at the unrealistic expectations I've seen expressed on the forums and in blog comments. Everybody knows there are bugs current, everybody knows that bugs are going to be an issue for awhile still. Every individual bug or problem doesn't need 37 separate threads created about it, with every other one demanding a refunding or making idle legal threats, or attention-whoring threats leave the world. When I say to "leave and come back later if it bothers you that bad" then that's what I mean. If you can't stop yourself from having a conniption when a bug that thousands of others are equally dealing with, then you may very well be best served to take a break and come back when things are a little more stable.


Bugs are being fixed. The people working on new features aren't the ones that should be fixing them. The people who have the most up-to-date knowledge on the specific bug should (and surely is) working to fix it, provided that no other bugs take precedence.


First, new features aren't trivial. Linden Labs can't expect to succeed and grow without constantly evolving the world.

Secondly, the problems are almost all related to the influx of residence. I'm sure the developers thought they'd have more time to grow the service as the population grows. Instead, it was exponential. They were caught by surprise, and are now catching up. It took them years to get to the point where growth became expontial, it's going to take them time to basically rewrite the entire infastructure to cope for the future. SL is still in a growth phase. The backend hasn't caught up yet, but it will.

Think for a minute here... if a developer knows that Bug A directly impacts Feature B, why would Feature B be knowingly rolled out broken? (There are, inevitably, going to be some unexpected instances where it's impossible to avoid it - such as Feature B also being a fix to Feature A which was irretrievably broken by its own bug which is causing all of the western hemisphere to crash and its deemed that living with Bug A is more acceptable than not having Feature A/B active - but I'm talking in the general sense.)


Bug #10021 wasn't fixed right away because there 10020 bugs that were more important. Now that its no longer the 10021st most important bug, time will be devoted to fix it.

Nobody ever said software development wasn't for the chaotophobic.

To continue my thought and to answer your other issue (as best I can - I'm not a Linden but I am a software developer) of knowing how a bug will affect your feature...

As a developer, you can't possibly predict all of the issues since there are thousands of different combinations of processors, memory types/brands, graphics cards/types, operating system configurations, etc.

You develop for what works under the most common conditions. Then you test. And test. And test. The First Look Viewer was changed and updated almost daily because it got quality feedback from individual contributors with different setups. Otherwise, it would've been impossible to predict where issues would pop up without assistance.

Unfortunately, some things can't be tuned to that scale. Server implentations are either there or they aren't. That's where the beta grid comes into play. That information is essential to finding bugs before mass release. Unfortunately, it's not workable for the Lindens to simulate the effect of 40000 in such an environment. They can get an idea of what they think might happen, but there are going to be surprises. It's perfectly normal for a process to stay in acceptable bounds while 25000 people are active, but as soon as the 25001st person tries it, the whole thing starts to unravel. But without that 25001st person actually trying it, you'll never know.

Let me guess............you are in the developmental area of software.

I understand most everything you are saying. But where I part with you is this business about pushing ahead when known issues are outstanding. You've admitted that unexpected problems arise due to minor issues from way before. You write code based on previously written code.........your code becomes faulty because of one little mistake made 2 years ago. You fix it........now you have other problems making your code problematic. Now you have to fix your code........everything's fine and dandy. Then 6 weeks later you get a call from some other developer who's stuff ain't working because of something you coded.......but you coded your stuff according to previous code You fix your end and the your friend is happy for the moment. Until he gets a call from yet another developer.............etc, etc, etc.

Somewhere along the line you are completely missing my point. Slow the hell down and fix the problems before you attempt building on a base that is faulty. It's a never ending crumbling process if you don't. Slowing down can (and almost always does) lead to faster developement.

But I guess it's a mind set in the tech field that will not change until someone like Lee A Iacoca comes along and stirs the pot.

Cheeseboat Interflug flips Jacques off

My first new car was a used 1984 Plymouth Reliant K which I bought *aka Dad sold me for 50 bucks* in 1988. I drove it everywhere, including once from New York to San Antonio and back, finally trading it in after finishing Grad School in 1996. it may still be tooling about the BQE for all I know. God Bless Lee Iacocca. America sorely misses you. Back on topic.....look how Microsoft handles software development. Should we expect LL to take it's cues elsewhere?

I do see your point. Bad organization and documentation within a project does make the whole thing weaker. I agree with you there.

Not being privy to the Linden's serverside codebase, I can't tell you if that's the case or not. I don't suspect it is, as the world does generally run as intended 95% of the time.

Lindens are kinda in Microsoft's boat.

MS's biggest problem is trying to accommodate everyone. If you could miraculously get it to load, Windows XP or Windows Vista would run with 95% functionality on a 10 year old PC's hardware. They've made it their philosophy to not draw a proverbial line in the sand and say "No. I refuse to let you load your Corel WordPerfect v1.2 for DOS file." or "No. I refuse to let you load your Iomega Jazz Drive from 1996."

This is part of the reason that Macs run so smooth. They control the hardware, therefore they control the drivers that connect the hardware to the software.

(Of course, Microsoft has done a sloppy job of software creation that borders inexcusability.)

But... Transfer WordPerfect documents and Jazz Drives with Obscuro-brand motherboard and Bargain Bill's SuperDuperMemory and you see a small slice of the Linden's predicament. That all goes back to the need for quality testing.

But..............and this a big BUT!!!!! Not mine...........LOL. MS comes out often with updates for all their supported operating systems but they are updates and patches to issues that have come about with user (and I'm sure security experts) that actually fix things. They don't introduce new features with those updates. They come out with service packs that usually do introduce new featues and bells and whistles....but not often. All these updates/patches and service packs never require higher end user system requirements. The system requirements remain the same throughout the life of the OS. It's only when a NEW operating system is introduced that new system requirements are necessary. I don't think Linden Labs can be compared to MS...........several, if not most, updates of SL require the end user to also update something........or reset their preferrences. How often have you had to do that with MS's updates?

And I'm not big fan of Microsoft...........but it's a fact. They remain within the capabilities of their users computer. They publish those requirements well in advance of any new OS before they are relaeased. And, believe it or not, they have customer support........and they are thousands times bigger than SL. It can be done..........and successfully too. And I believe MS's development team coordinates completely with the lowly old coders.

MS is not doing virtual stuff like LL is attempting......but I would bet heavily on MS over LL if they did get in the business. Even with LL's head start. It's organaization and structure.

Now, I want to say to you, Jacques.............I'm enjoying the hell out of our back and forth. I'm not in any way trying to one up you or shoot holes in your posts. I'm learning and I thank you for staying with me.

They seriously need s team put together liek they had for Firstlook to look into the Vista issues. ive got a Geoforce 7500 LE w/ the Vista upgrade and im crashing every few minutes.. the Card is a 512 but that memory slot is unavalible.. When asking for help its always check for updates or check the KB.. well there aint gonna be another update since i asked them and the KB just says to check the drivers.. I see no help anywhere or anywhere I can report issues to directly.