Reader Submitted: The Cloud Move

By Kἶէმƈεlἶმ Lմἶղƈօɾἶმlօէε Kεlνმɾl (Kitacelia Resident)

The first thing I have noticed, is much slower rezzing sometimes taking as much as 20 minutes to rezz an area and some items still not rezzing no matter how long you wait or leave or relog that weren't blocked or blacklisted.

The next thing I have noticed is that DJ streams seem to hiccup or skip quite often now, regardless of their internet, PCs, DJing program or location. I notice this because I host quite often so listening to DJ streams is  a large part of that. I hate to imagine what a DJ goes through trying to run a DJ  program and Second Life with all the current SL issues.

I have also experienced increased logging in times, as much as two to three times longer at times.  I have experienced increased lag and crashing as well.  I have major cable company high speed internet and while my PC isn't top of the line it is fairly decent and relatively newish.

Another issue, while I am uncertain it is related, is that I had once experience several months ago where all the scripted objects on land I rent broke, and had to be reset. Some permanently broke, and had to be replaced or were gone forever.  Several other times the same land my avi wouldn't rezz and nothing could be rezzed.

Several items that were scripted seem to have broken in some fashion due to updates and often it was up to the creators to fix them or not as LL apparently did little to nothing to deal with the script issues on certain items caused by these updates.

I have also noticed more bugs, and it taking longer for them to fix them. One especially annoying one that apparently took two weeks to fix was the recent timestamp issue on group notices where they looked like they were all sent the exact min, second, hour, day etc you looked back at the notices.  There were also issues with flickr and other things that came up and didn't seem to be resolved in a particularly timely manner.  

Increased scheduled and unscheduled maintenance has also been happening, which makes it difficult to do much in Second Life, much of it during prime time hours for the US and/or Europe. Also, it seems the servers either have a very small limit or aren't good at keeping track of blacklisted items.

While they have introduced some really cool new projects in the last few years, I hope they will reconsider this cloud move as it seems to be not only hindering the application of the cool new additions to a degree but also making more traditional applications/objects difficult as well to a point Second Life is sometimes barely playable and possibly not playable at all for some.   I have been in SL almost daily for nearly eight years. So while I am not one of the first or close to it, I am not even remotely close to new, recent, or a casual user.

I think Second Life has the population they have kept going mainly because they have had no real competition. If these issues persist or worsen I wonder how many will remain here post Covid-19.

Kitacelia

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