Technical Difficulties Keep Some Offline, Interfere With Support And Money Transactions

 

 Yesterday, Sunday August 23, some residents had trouble logging on, and if they were on weren't always able to make or see announcements. 

We are currently investigating the outage of our Support services. At this time residents may experience issues accessing their dashboard on Second Life, logging inworld, and the ability to access Live Chat or to submit a Support case. We greatly apologize for this inconvenience. Please follow this blog for any further updates.

Chat did continue to happen to a smaller degree, some residents noticing fewer people than expected showing up at events, and money transactions not going through. 

 

Finally at 2:57 PM SL time, almost three hours after the problem had been announced, Linden Lab stated the situation has been resolved. 

 

Bixyl Shuftan 

 

2025 Summer Grid Games This Weekend

 

 A story we're a little late on reporting on, but there's one more day of it. This is the third day of the Summer Grid Games. 

 

Get ready to witness the best of sportsmanship and skill from all across the grid in a variety of thrilling sports! Whether you're a passionate athlete or an enthusiastic spectator, the Grid Games Championship promises something for everyone. The championship event runs from August 22nd to 24th, join the fun! 

 

For today, Sunday, August 24th, the events are as follows:

Boxing (Fightality HUD) – 8:00 AM
Motorsports 1v1 – 11:00 AM
Cross Country – 2:00 PM
Freestyle Dressage – 3:00 PM 

 

There is also swimming and golf going on (no time listed on the notecard) 

 

http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Blueberry/13/222/1001 

Total Number of Sims Over 28,000, First Time In Over A Decade

 

Some good news for those who take pride in how large Second Life is in how much virtual land it has.  The Second Life Grid Survey (https://gridsurvey.com/) , run by Tyche Shepherd, in it's latest numbers announced that the total number of sims had climbed to over the 28,000 mark.

 

Breaking the number down, 18,220 were private sims, and 9801 were "Linden owned." This includes the growing number of Bellisseria Linden Home sims. 

The last time the total number of sims was this large was in 2012. There was a peak close to 32,000 in 2010, then it went on a long and slow decline until about 2018 to about 23,000 before it began to slowly rise again. This is partially due to more people getting private sims, but also the popularity of Linden Homes, of which one needs a Premium account to get. 

Will the total number get to 29,000, then 30,000 again? Time will tell.

Hat Tip: Daniel Voyager

Bixyl Shuftan

Sim Total Number Growth, Slight Decline In Private Estates, Continues

 

The current number of sims is 27,735 according to the Second Life Grid Survey. That's more than the number there were at the start of the year according to an article by Daniel Voyager, 27,659. But there is one small detail with the statistics: the number of private sims.

 

As most residents know, some sims are outright owned by Linden Lab while the majority are run by private residents. At the start of the year, January 1, 2023, there were 18,370 private sims and 9289 Linden-owned sims. By July 2, the number of private sims had dipped to 18,330 and the number of Linden owned once had rose to 9360. As of the last report in November 19, the number of Linden run sims had once again risen, to 9542. But once again, the amount of private sims dropped slightly, to 18,193. 

 

So there are 177 fewer private sims and 253 more Linden-run sims than at the beginning of the year. This trend isn't necessarily a bad thing for Linden Lab. While private sims do bring in a lot of money, $210 USD a month, the Linden Home sims on Bellisseria can hold plenty of Linden Homes, and plenty of Premium residents, who pay $12 each a month. And then there's the money they spend, of which the easiest way to get is to buy Linden dollars. On the other hand, private sims can be used to create great and interesting builds, which can attract curious people to Second Life by word of mouth.

So will these trends continue? Time will tell.

Sources: Daniel Voyager's Blog, Second Life Grid Survey

Bixyl Shuftan

Grid and Viewer Glitches?

 

 Lately it seems my alt Rezzdarnnit is living up to his name.

It's been a little more than a week since the February 1 outages that took out a number of sims for a while, caused people to have problems logging in, and other problems. Since then, I've heard of, and to a lesser degree experienced, a few issues that aren't just the usual lag. Some people are taking longer to rezz, longer to see others rezz, longer to see sims rezz, and some trouble logging in.

  

The news isn't *entirely* bad. Since upgrading my Firestorm on the day before the required update, my frames per second is sometimes quite a bit more than it was before, at least when there's few to no other avatars around. 

Checking the Grid Status Report, there was a mention of a long-running issue "Online Friends Display Issues," for close to a month, " We are aware that some of our Residents are currently experiencing issues with online friends not showing correctly. Our engineers are hard at work to correct this behavior as soon as possible; however, there may be an extended time frame before this occurs." 

 

This hasn't been the first time the Grid has had more than the usual amount of bugs. During Second Life's move to Amazon Cloud servers, there were many to the point Linden Lab was asking for patience for the many weeks it would take. What could be causing these issues, we don't know, yet.

Hopefully things will be fixed soon.

Bixyl Shuftan

Update on Bonniebots

 

 Of our article on the Bonniebots on Friday, there were two responses. One lengthy one from an anonymous reader felt there was little if anything to worry about, "I have to say the bots seem benign, maybe even beneficial ... after having spoken with the creator and the lengths they go through to keep the data benign I have to say their activity appears to be more responsible than most bot operators, the bots even now provide links to show what their doing, when I first encountered them, they may of been in the testing phase, but they offer no data that isn't easily obtained within SL beyond showing where they've last seen people at ... I think the only reason these bots attract so much ire is because they don't hide the fact they have the same origin by giving them diversely different names which gives haters a clear target making them a little harder to dismiss as random. ...the data they collect is publicly available and easy to collect and isn't anything newly generated that breaches actual privacy unlike that trash from ... zfire and Monkey."

 

Nydia Tungsten's response was shorter, feeling there had to be some changes, "They should leave the Avatar search off and let people Opt IN, there will be a lot of people that have no clue about this. But MY main concern as someone that owns multiple sims is I would LIKE to see a way to opt my sims out completely. I am getting so very tired of bots popping in when and where ever in residential area's. Granted this could be a boon for business areas and more power to them, me, I detest all bots and want them to stay out of my sims period."

Since our article, there's been two changes. Early this week, the Bonniebot website now had an "About" page, at https://www.bonniebots.com/about . There were four sections: Bonnie, FAQ API, and Opt Out. Opt Out gave the following, "To opt-out, send an in-world message to bonniebelle86 containing the phrase 'opt-out'. The opt-out applies to Top Merchants and Avatar Search." At the bottom of the page are the names of the Bonniebots.

 

The FAQ page had questions such as "What data is being collected?" "How do I prevent Bonniebots from visiting my region?" "Do other people have databases like this?" and others, and when clicked in would reveal an answer. 

Later in the week, the Search page was gone. So people could no longer search for information on certain avatars, at least within the website (searching inworld is still very much fair game). So those who complained about that no longer have to worry about it. 

In the meantime, the Bonniebots, and their less visible counterparts, are still going about their business, hopping around the Grid and collecting information. But unlike other bots, it's as simple as going to a website to look up the Bonniebots' names so you can block them from your land.

Bixyl Shuftan

Bonniebots and The Debate About Them

 

In the past few days, a new controversy has come up in the Second Life forums: the Bonniebots. Some say they provide a useful service. Others call them a privacy threat and a violation of the Terms of Service. The topic was a hot one in the Second Life forums with four threads on the topic shut down by the Lindens. In the last one, Patch Linden stated they would soon be meeting up with the bots' team.

 

 Read the story in Design.

Technical Difficulties For The Grid on Tuesday

 *

Tuesday January was the day rolling restarts were done this week around the Grid. Usually they go routine. But this time something went wrong. Some residents would have trouble logging in, and others noted some sims looked offline. When I tried logging in on Sunweaver Bay, the login screen got stuck in the middle of the progress. In various Second Life Discord channels, people noted their difficulties.

Eventually, the Lab noticed there was a problem, and posted on the Grid Status Report.

We are aware rolling restarts are taking longer than normal, and we are working to bring these regions back online as quickly as possible. We thank you for your patience! Please follow this blog for further updates. - 08:06 PST

We apologize for the delay, and are continuing to work to bring these regions back online as quickly as possible. We thank you for your patience! Please follow this blog for further updates. - 09:10 PST 

 

We are continuing to work on restoring the regions still offline from this morning's Rolling Restarts, and are making progress. Please watch this blog for updates. - 09:45 PST

 

Getting online, there was chatter about it in several groups I was in, including the Bellisserian chat. At one point, Abnor Mole spoke up, "The restarts this week have been going... poorly. The region your home is in it probably one of those affected, but it is not alone. The Lindens are well aware of the problem and working on it."

Eventually, the Lab finally fixed whatever the problem was, but decided to restart some of the sims again to make sure.

We believe this issue has been resolved but will be restarting some regions as part of the final process. Thank you for your continued patience! - 12:45 PST

Eventually, all was back to normal, with the usual lag, and the residents went on.
 
Bixyl Shuftan
 

Eye On The Blog: Updating Script Performance

 
On the official blog yesterday, Linden Lab announced they had "released a change this week" with the aim of improving script performance in the Grid: Uplift.

Uplift has been an ongoing adventure for a number of engineering teams, but the goal of improving the SL experience for all residents has not changed.

Uplift brought in new hardware and the ability to reconfigure it quickly to react to changing circumstances. A few months ago, we quietly changed hardware configurations to provide better performance for the simulators, but our job was not done there.

After this upgrade our engineering teams dug deep into the simulator to modernize it and take better advantage of AWS capabilities. We referred to this as our “Tooling Update,”  which allows LSL scripts to run more efficiently. Regions with heavy script usage will likely see more scripts run and even some spare time returning to the simulator.  The release also includes a modernization of our compiler and supporting runtime.  Newer tools allows for better code generation and awareness of modern CPU designs.

But the Lab admits there have been unforseen problems that residents may experience.They stated, "with more scripts running, other areas of the simulation environment may be driven harder.  Scripts that were already approaching throttles or other limits may find a throttle engaged .... We do see the possibility of revisiting these throttling limits as a result of these improvements. They could see higher request rates as scripts perform more work."

For the blog post in full, Click Here.
 

"Unscheduled Maintenance" Offlines Second Life For Hours

 

If you tried to log into Second Life yesterday and couldn't get on, you were far from alone. For much of the day, residents couldn't log in, or access secondlife.com, or the Marketplace. The Grid Status Report first mentioned there was a problem at 11:14 AM SL time. 

We are currently seeing intermittent issues with Profiles, Marketplace, and Log ins, and we are currently investigating this. Please watch this blog for updates.

Posted * ***** ***. Aug 31, 2021 - 11:14 PDT

Unfortunately, the issue was not resolved quickly. Hours would pass, and the Lab's finest were still working on the issue.

We are still working on resolving this, and we thank you for your patience! Please watch this blog for updates. 

Finally at 3:57 PM SL time, the Lab stated they were on their way to fixing the problem.

All services should be recovered, and we continue to monitor their performance. If you're having trouble getting to some of the websites, please try clearing your cookies. Thank you for your patience, and we hope the rest of today is going to be all smooth sailing. 

Still, it wouldn't be 5:54 PM SL time before the Lab would say with confidence, "This incident has been resolved," over six hours since they announced their was a problem. When residents tried to get on the website, sometimes all they got was a blank page. At other times they would get the "Uh oh, it's buggy" 500 error message shown at the top. A few residents would look back to earlier times when Linden Lab was more willing to poke fun at itself and post a picture of apes armed with bones gathering around a monolith, "The grid is down while we bang on things." A few more irritated residents wondered if the glitch was a result of the Cloud Servers, and something they could expect time to time for the forseable future. 

In any event, the glitch has been fixed, and all is well again, for now.

Bixyl Shuftan
 

Map Issues (Mostly) Fixed, New Sims Visible

After months of not working properly, the Second Life map is more or less back to normal. For months, one couldn't zoom out more than a little without the sims turning invisible. If a sim changed it's appearance, it wouldn't show on the map. And if a new sim appeared, such as the Chalet Linden Home ones that connected Bellisseria with the eastern mainland continents, it would be invisible except for it's name. Naturally, many residents complained, and even the Moles were saying they were inconvenienced. But for month after month, despite the efforts of Lindens working on the problem, including a greater effort after the move to the Cloud was completed in early January, the glitches remained. There were a couple resident-made maps that helped with the panning out problem, but the others remained.

Finally few days ago on April 15, Linden Lab announced on the Grid Status Report that they were on the verge of finally fixing it.

We know it's been a long time! Thank you for your continued patience. We finally have a fix in testing, and look forward to rolling it out soon! 

But it wasn't until yesterday, Monday April 19, in which they announced the work was done.

Hooray! We have a working system for generating map tiles again, along with a few other fixes to maps (zoom). We're still monitoring the results. Thank you for your patience during this long wait, and happy navigating. 

 It should be noted that sometimes the map still glitches a little when used. A time or two when I was trying it recently, sims did turn invisible when panning out or zooming in. But more often, they would appear normally, occasionally taking a little time to rezz. And there are other glitch issues, such as the group chat issues which have made communications between numbers of people a bit difficult at times.

So this means that any sims with big changes, like the sign over Raglan Shire, are now visible. And any new sims, like Bellisseria's Chalet sims on it's northeast, can now be seen. So now planning that boat trip across the Blake Sea or the Straits of Bellisseria will be much easier.
 
Bixyl Shuftan
 

Unusual Sight on The Grid

 

 Going about the Grid on an alt while testing a Cloud data detector (more on that later), I stumbled across a few unusual sights. One was a location I'll try to describe in detail later. Another was this circle of avatars I saw on the map just off Bellisseria.

Taking a look, all of these avatars were underwater, and appeared invisible. They didn't respond to me, so presumably they were alts that were placed there, for some unknown purpose. As this was a water sim with no attractions, not sure what they were trying to accomplish other than a neat circle on the map.

Bixyl Shuftan

Late Night Grid Issues

 If you were trying to log in late last night and couldn't, it wasn't just you. The Grid became not accessible to those whom weren't already on, eventually showing up in the Grid Status Report.


Second Life is currently unavailable. Our engineers are working on correcting the issue as quickly as we can. Please check this blog for future updates as we have them.


According to the Grid Status Report, the issue was found at 2:30 SL time, and fixed almost an hour later.

Glitches on The Grid

On Friday January 17, Club Cutlass in Sunweaver Bay was having it's "Military" party when all of a sudden, everyone's viewer crashed. As people came back online, they saw the sim was down. It took several minutes, but eventually the area was back online and the party resumed.

But this wasn't the only glitch this weekend. On Sunday afternoon, January 19, people were saying in SL and Discord they were having a hard time logging on.  Checking the Grid Status Report, the Lab confirmed there were login issues that day, as well as trouble on the 17th.

We are aware that some Residents may be experiencing problems trying to log into and/or stay connected to Second Life. Our engineers are actively trying to alleviate the issue.

It took a few hours, but eventually the Lindens "banging on things" had some results, and people were able to login and log off without worry. At least most of us weren't worried. One friend of mine whom was both at Cutlass on Friday and had login trouble Sunday half-seriously wondered if somehow the Lindens were out to get her. They weren't of course, though it certainly felt like it.

Bixyl Shuftan

Great Canadian Grid Offline

So soon after High Fidelity is about to all but shut down, another virtual world is in trouble. According to an article on Hypergrid Business, dated December 28, as well as some chatter on Discord, the Great Canadian Grid, a small Opensim world, has been taken offline.

The reason for the world being offline is apparently a personal dispute between it's owner Roddie Macchi and that of a larger virtual world, Digiworld's Terry Ford. Digiworld had been handling the smaller world's grid management services. Then somehow the two owners got into an argument of some kind, and the Great Canadian Grid was taken offline after these services were stopped.

Macchi has reacted by starting a Gofundme campaign, which he says is to help pay for technical help and new services to restore the Great Canadian Grid.  As of the writing of this article, $1,175 USD had been raised.

There was no shortage of negative comments following the articles, as well in Discord. A few compared the Great Canadian Grid Gofundme to the InWorldz one over a year ago, which was unsuccessful in saving it. Some felt the incident not only made the two grid owners, but also Opensim as a whole, look bad, "It deeply saddens me it has come to this but it is our farewell to opensimulator altogether. My wife and I are heading back to our mainland parcel in Second Life ..." "... you complain that 'Why are people from Second Life not coming to you?' Coz you are terrible managers."

Bixyl Shuftan

April Linden Explains Last Sunday's Outage

If you tried to get on Second Life on Sunday October 27th, then you may have been blocked by issues that persisted all afternoon. On Wednesday, April Linden, the Operations Manager of the Grid, posted in the Tools and Technology blog just what happened in "The Sunday That Was Not a Fun Day."

The trouble started back on Thursday. We had some pretty bad problems talking to key services (packet loss) on one of our Internet links. It didn’t impact everything, but the stuff it hit was pretty important. It started for a few hours on Thursday, but just magically went away on its own. It’s never good when a problem just magically fixes itself because it’s pretty likely it’s gonna happen again. 

The same thing happened again on Friday, but once again it went away on its own before we were able to debug what actually happened. 

We were nervous going into the weekend, and sure enough, it bit us again on Sunday. We started having more Internet communication problems, but this time, it didn’t just go away. 

Now that we had it in a bad state we started to troubleshoot and figured out really fast that it wasn’t our equipment. Our stuff was (and still is) working just fine, but we were getting intermittent errors and delays on traffic that was routed through one of our providers. We quickly opened a ticket with the network provider and started engaging with them. That’s never a fun thing to do because these are times when we’re waiting on hold on the phone with a vendor while Second Life isn’t running as well as it usually does. 

After several hours trying to troubleshoot with the vendor, we decided to swing a bigger hammer and adjust our Internet routing. It took a few attempts, but we finally got it, and we were able to route around the problematic network. We’re still trying to troubleshoot with the vendor, but Second Life is back to normal again.

April went on to say that the power outages affecting much of California had nothing to do with the outage, although one of the people working on the issue was, "One of our engineers was working in the dark in a house without power, with his laptop being powered by a long string of extension cords that ran to a generator outside."

We’re really sorry that this past Sunday wasn’t very fun. The weekend before Halloween is a really fun time to be Inworld, and it was a frustrating day all the way around. (I personally love the way our Residents really get into Halloween in a way that’s only possible in Second Life!) Knowing that it wasn't as awesome as it could have been makes me sad, and we’re working to make it better in the future. 

April requested that if anyone suspects an issue that may have been caused by the outage, please let the Support team know.

Source: BBC, Tools and Technology

Bixyl Shuftan

More on The Scheduled Maintenance Outage

On late Monday night just after 9:30PM SL time, Second Life experienced an outage that offlined practically all the residents. While some trouble was expected due to the scheduled maintenance that night, what happened was a surprise. Not just logins onto the Grid, but Marketplace, secondlife.com, JIRA, mysecondlife. and more were disabled.

In the forums, Grumpity Linden would respond the the comments of residents in the "Network Maintenance" and the "Second Life is Down" threads, "It's probably cold comfort to reiterate to everyone here that this is not our idea of a good time either." "We're not actually that crazy about taking down the grid, but we had to bang on some things, and are terribly sorry! "

Reactions from the residents varied. One person messaged me, asking me if I thought Linden Lab hand finally shut down Second Life for good. Others grumbled. Some began cracking jokes about not knowing what to do with their time now that they couldn't log in (not unlike the Facebook outage a couple months ago), that there'd be a small baby boom in nine months, and that finally Sansar had more people inworld than Second Life had. And of course there were jokes about the Lindens "banging on things," someone tripping over a power cord, and the cleaning lady causing a short after plugging in her vacuum in the wrong place, Grumpity commenting, "I feel like the cleaning crew is getting a bad rep here!"

Finally at 1:43AM Tuesday morning, the Lindens announced on the Grid Status Report, "We are bringing services back online. Logins have been turned back on. Your experience may still be bumpy as normal concurrency resumes. Thank you for your patience!" Grumpity would say, "Thank you all for your patience.  We can't wait to call it a night! "

But on Tuesday night as this was a second night of scheduled maintenance, there were some worries this would happen again. Grumpity assured that this was highly unlikely, "While you may experience minor disruption, it will be nothing like last night.   Just in case though, we've sacrificed a goat.  It gives us just a little extra confidence." Fortunately, there was no major disruption that night, and residents appear to have more or less gotten about normally.

Third image credit, JB Raccoon

Bixyl Shuftan

Breaking News: Second Life is Down

 If you got knocked off online, you're far from alone. Shortly after 9:30PM SL time, most residents were logged off the grid. A look at the Firestorn viewer showed only a few hundred still on the Grid. A look at the Grid Status Report showed logins were disabled.

While this was the first of four days of scheduled maintenance, it's doubtful they intended to log off everyone. For now, they've disabled logins. Grumpity Linden says people should be able to get back on "soon."

Stay tuned for more information.

Linden Lab's Linux OS Update Suspected in Grid Troubles

It's been almost two weeks since Linden Lab admitted what many residents had suspected for a while, that residents were having more issues on the Grid, notably teleporting between sims or walking between them. However, the Lab may have identified a cause of the trouble. Inara Pey recently wrote that last week on Thursday April 18 at the Content Creation User Group meeting, Vir Linden stated the problem might be an update of theirs on the servers for Linux OS.

"Yeah, we've been having some issues on the simulator side where people tend to get disconnected between teleports, it's been common enough that it shows up as a significant blip in our stats. And that issue seems to have come along, basically when we upgraded our version of Linux that we're using on our simulators. So we've had some rollbacks there, just to try and get that issue to go away.

"That kinda pushes out the timeline for (deploying) all the things based on Jessie, the later version (of Linux) that we're trying to update to. Hopefully we can get those out soon, but I can't tell you anything about the timeline. ..."

So now that the Lab says they might have found the cause of the trouble, will this soon mean not so many issues on the Grid? Time will tell.

Source: Modem World

Bixyl Shuftan

"Darn Teleport Disconnects," Lab Admits Grid Trouble

If you're been having trouble teleporting across Second Life lately, you're not alone. Lately, a number of people in group chats I've listened in on, as well as friends and associates in private messages, have been complaining about various glitches on the grid. Besides the lag, probably the most frequent complaint I've heard has been crashing while trying to teleport from one spot to another.

Well, it seems things have gotten to the point that the Lab has to acknowledge there's a problem. In the "Tools and Technology" part of the official Second Life blog on Monday April 9, they posted that they're aware of the problem.

Many Residents have noted that in the last few weeks we have had an increase in disconnects during a teleport. These occur when an avatar attempts to teleport to a new Region (or cross a Region boundary, which is handled similarly internally) and the teleport or Region crossing takes longer than usual.  Instead of arriving at the expected destination, the viewer disconnects ...

The Lab believes that the cause is "a timing-sensitive failure in the hand-off" between sims when a teleport takes place, and there doesn't seem to be a way to eliminate the chance of a crash. They have people trying to get to the root of the problem and get rid of it. "Quite unfortunately, this problem dodged our usual monitors of the behavior of simulators in the Release Channels, and as a result we're also enhancing those monitors to prevent similar problems getting past us in the future. We're sorry about this - we empathize with how disruptive it has been."

A few residents I've talked to wonder if Linden Lab's moving information of it's data centers to cloud servers has something to do with recent bugs. When Patch and Grumpity Linden spoke at the VWBPE last Thursday, Grumpity stated the Lab was "very carefully moving things and not disturbing the way things are set up." So if one takes the Lab's word for it, the problem isn't The Cloud.

In the meantime, it looks like residents will be dealing with the possibility of their teleports ending up as viewer crashes, and having to restart the viewers and slowly log back in.

Bixyl Shuftan