SLife and Times: Viewer Issues

"Is it just me, or is there something wrong with Second Life?" That's been a question I've been asking myself this week. One of the places I go to regularly, there's not usually any problem and I can cam around and chat to my hearts content. But twice this week, things began to slow down and freeze up to the point the screen would turn black. A few times I had to close the viewer and restart. The crowd wasn't that particularly big, about a dozen people. I managed to get around it by focusing on just myself, or some corner of the place. But that wasn't much fun.

This was the buggiest time I've had since November when a "Unscheduled Maintenance" at the time caused people to be knocked off the grid. But checking the Grid Status Report, while there were some rolling restarts at the time, there wasn't anything out of the ordinary mentioned.

Chatting with friends, a few have been telling me they've been having troubles as well. One wondered if it was Linden Lab's moving things to "cloud" servers. Another wondered if it was someone's avatar, or the avatars of a few people, that was so resource-intensive, it slowed everyone else down, an issue I touched on last month.

Does the machine need replaced? It is a few years old. But friends of mine have been able to get by on machines much older. Plus I don't have a lot of money to spend. And I recall a friend of mine once got a new computer, and her performance on Second Life actually got worse.

In any event, the issue went away after a while. Hopefully it was just a fluke and the problem, whatever it was, won't show up again. At least not for a while. Glitches and bugs have always been a part of Second Life. So we learn to put up with them when they're small and occasional. It's when things get out of the ordinary when we notice.

Bixyl Shuftan