From Chris Linden:
Overall, Linden Lab strives to be as transparent as possible in our communication. However, sometimes events outpace our ability to communicate to our community what is transpiring. A week and a half has gone by since we launched 1.7. In that time a lot has occurred. We have updated the client four times and the servers five times. Furthermore, we have another client and server update tentatively scheduled for next Tuesday, November 8th. At the heart of your question, I believe, is that you want to know where does the 1.7 and its subsequent updates leave Second Life? I have both good and bad news. First the bad news:
Client Frames Rate
As you can see from the attached graph, 1.7 caused the average viewer frame rate to drop from 15.5 FPS to 12.2 FPS. With the following updates we have managed to reclaim roughly 0.5 FPS. Clearly though we still have a lot of work ahead of us to get frame rate back up above 15 FPS. Furthermore, it is our long term goal to get Client frame rate substantially higher than that.
Crash Rate
Overall client crash rate has not significantly changed between 1.6 and 1.7. In a given 24 hour period, before 1.7 was launched, roughly 30% of login sessions experienced a crash or lockup. This remains true after 1.7. Obviously these are not great statistics, in the last month we have launched a developer program to track down our crashes and reduce the number dramatically. They have just recently finished an extensive project of analyzing and sorting all our crash data. As a sample, in the last twenty four hours our top three crashes that we can identify are as follows:
160 crashes - ATI OpenGL Crashes
73 crashes - Crashes in QuickTime and QuickTime Streaming
66 crashes - General crashes in freeing memory
The crash team is now actively working on resolving the crashes they have identified.
Server Frame Rate
Now for the good news, overall the % of the grid that is running slowly has decreased since 1.7 launched from an average of 0.5% and 0.9% during primetime to a relatively sable 0.2%. During primetime this is a 4.5 times improvement in simulator performance!
However, we do know that there is a very small subset of sims that are having a specific server frame rate problems. We have a small team actively working on solving that problem. Overall, we feel this is a significant achievement, especially since this server performance improvements was one the intended results of 1.7.