Breaking News: Second Life's Cloud Servers Degrading, Lag And Other Issues To Get Significantly Worse

 Update: April Fools

In a stunning development, Linden Lab announced an unexpected and severe problem with the Amazon Cloud Servers that now house Second Life's data. The servers have been deteriorating and glitching, and the problem is going to get much worse.

"It turns out the servers that Amazon provided us with weren't meant to take the strain of a virtual world as active as Second Life is," the statement by the Lab explained, "Not only are we not getting the performance improvements we were hoping for, the lag and other issues such as teleport fails and inventory issues have been slowly getting worse over the past few months."

The statement went on to say that the servers are starting to deteriorate faster,  and so the issues will start to get even worse, and fast. It's estimated that within two weeks, viewers will need four to five times to load information around an avatar after TPing or logging on. Crashes an teleport fails will be several more times likely to happen as well, and items will start vanishing from inventories. Within three weeks, viewers will take ten times as long to process information after logging on or teleporting. That is if people can log on or teleport at all as fails will start to keep people from doing so for five to ten minutes. And within a month, Second Life will become unusable to those without newer and more powerful computers.

Linden Lab is working with Amazon to get better servers and transfer the data to them, but this will take time. For now, the Lab is offering a downloadable code that will allow the servers to better recognize users and their data and not suffer quite as much lag.

For more information and to download the code: Click Here. 

Bixyl Shuftan
 

EOTB: "The Migration Of Second Life To The Cloud Is Now Complete!"

 
On Tuesday January 5, Linden Lab announced on the official blog they had completed the move of Second Life data from their old servers to the Amazon Cloud servers.

As the new year begins, we have some exciting news to share. The migration of Second Life to the cloud is now complete!

All the interconnected services and databases that collectively provide you with Second Life have been migrated to Amazon’s cloud servers. The "uplift" to the cloud will help bring better simulator performance and also improves our ability to diagnose problems and scale our systems for future growth and improvements.  

They showed a picture of "the former cage in our colocation facility that housed our servers since 2009, now cleaned out and completely empty." They also showed a video of the old hardware being destroyed.

Many have asked us what happened to the “old” hardware that steadily served up Second Life for so many years. Most of it was too old to have any value and has been scrapped, but it is important to note that as part of our standard security protocols, all of the drives have been shredded and destroyed. Thanks for all the memories, old friends!

While the physical move is complete, there remain some optimization tweaks that we will continue to make to further improve performance over the coming weeks, and of course there are always bugs to hunt. We are truly grateful for your patience, especially during the final few weeks of 2020 as we worked furiously to finish the last parts of this migration.

Of the video, Zidders Roofurry would post in the comments with song lyrics:

Oh grind up the homes where the avatars roamed
and the neko's and furries once played.
Where ever was 'heard' many a virtual word
and via Windlight our stars were displayed.

Roam, roam SL's range
as the servers to clouds are all changed.
Now afloat with our words our dreams fly like a bird
And our Second Life is Amazon conveyed.

To see the Linden blog post in full, Click Here.

Bixyl Shuftan

"We Are Now In The Cloud"

 
It's been about a month since April Linden announced that the data from all the sims (aside from a few Linden ones) had been moved to Cloud servers. But there was still some work to be done. This week, there was some more news about the last stages of the move. On Tuesday, it was announced that "as part of our overall migration to the cloud, some of our web publishing tools ... may be unavailable for our internal editorial team." And so the Second Life Destination Guide was getting a temporary freeze on updates. Also on Tuesday, according to Inara Pey, at the Simulator User Group meeting April and Oz Linden had stated all Second Life systems and service were now running on Amazon Cloud Servers. So the Lab was clearing all of it's equipment from it's "former co-location facility in Arizona."

At the Wednesday Third Party Viewer Meeting, supposedly Oz Linden was more direct, "Actually, we disconnected the datacenter last night ... everything is now running in AWS."

It's not an announcement that's being celebrated by all. There's been a number of glitches on the Grid lately, and Inara Pey stated in the same article that the Lab was working to fix an issue on the map. While the move to the Cloud may be done, the job of taking care of the bugs and glitches as a result of the move remains.

Source: Modem World , SL forums 

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April Linden Announces All Sims Moved To The Cloud

 

It was just about a week ago in which it was announced half the sims had their data moved to the Cloud. So with all the time that had been done before, one would probably expect quite a bit of time before the other half were moved. Well, that's not quite what happened. Yesterday, Thursday November 19, April announced that all of the sims now had their data moved to Cloud servers.

The team just finished up moving all of the regions to the cloud! We did it, before our goal of Thanksgiving!!! Uplift isn't done, we still have things to move, but getting the regions done FEELS SO GOOD!

As April stated, this isn't the end of the work on the Cloud move. And there's still glitching going on. For instance, there were issues with group chat, teleporting, and reading the world map. But it is a notable milestone that hopefully will lead to an improved Second Life.

Bixyl Shuftan

Number of Sims Moved to The Cloud Passes 50%

 

Of the move of sim data to Cloud servers, a noteable milestone was achieved a few days ago, at least according to Daniel Voyager. In his blog, he reported that Stawberry Linden had told him that April Linden had told her that half the sims now had their data in The Cloud.

Hi Daniel, this is Strawberry. I have confirmed with our Sr. Engineering Manager, April Linden, that over half the regions in Second Life are now running in the cloud.

Since this was a few days ago, The Lab has no doubt continued it's work. How long will it take until the move is complete? Daniel Voyager himmself thought it would be "six weeks or so."

Source: Daniel Voyager's Blog
Image Source: Linden Lab

EOTB: Linden Lab Asking For Help Testing Linden Realms in Beta Grid Cloud Servers

In the official blog, Linden Lab was asking for volunteers to test out it's Cloud servers in the Beta Grid. The testing would be done in the Linden Realms game area there.

As you may know, we are in the process of moving Second Life to the cloud! Our first ever cloud simulators, on the beta grid, have been uplifted, and we can use your assistance. Here’s your opportunity to be among the first Residents to test the performance of uplift.
 
Log in to the beta grid (click here for instructions) and start at the Aditi Portal Park to try out Linden Realms in the cloud. Bring your friends and spend some time engaging in the virtual experience produced and provided by Linden Lab. You may even run into the often unseen technical Lindens working away. Don’t forget to ask them for their Linden bear, and beware of the rock monster!
 
If you find any issues with Linden Realms on the beta grid, please file a BUG jira at https://jira.secondlife.com, and make sure to include the time, date, region you were in when you found the issue, and a description of what happened, as well as what you would expect to happen in a similar situation on the Main Grid today.

Linden Lab is in the process of moving data from existing servers to Cloud-based servers.

Source: Linden blog

Reader Submitted: The Cloud Move

Kἶէმƈεlἶმ Lմἶղƈօɾἶმlօէε Kεlνმɾl (Kitacelia Resident) recently sent a reader submitted commentary about what she feels has become quite an aggravating problem: increasing lag along with bugs and glitches due to Linden Lab moving data from it's current servers to cloud-based ones. The Lab's "good idea," from her point of view, is causing a lot of problems. So she took the time to explain the problem as she sees it.

Read Kitacelia's reader submission in Extra.

"Premium Plus" Accounts Delayed

Last November, among an announcement on the upcoming option to change account names, Linden Lab also stated that there would soon be an option to upgrade their accounts to a level above Premium, called Premium Plus.

Changes are underway for Premium Membership. In 2020, you’ll see a new membership level, Premium Plus. This new option will join our classic Premium tier as an additional choice for Residents who want to get even more value from their Second Life.

According to an article written by Inara Pey, it seems the Linden Lab has delayed the rollout of Premium Plus. Grumpity Linden stated the two main reasons were wanting to focus more on the transition to the cloud servers, and with many residents hit hard financially by the Coronavirus crisis it was believed it wasn't a good time to roll out the feature.

We have made the decision to delay the deployment of Premium Plus based on two key factors:

1. We want to be focused on our Uplift project (move to the cloud) and to minimize distraction for our development, QA, and Ops teams. While we’ve laid a lot of groundwork, quite a bit more still remains to finish Premium Plus.
2. The pandemic has brought a lot of financial uncertainty to people all around the world and we know many of our Residents have been hit hard.

We are very happy that SL has provided an outlet for people where they can connect, escape, engage safely, and earn a living or supplement their income as well. But we also realise that introducing a higher-priced service level in this time would be really ham-handed.

It should be noted that a few days ago, Linden Lab stated earlier that there was a "Limited Availability" of new private sims due in part to their transitioning to cloud servers not complete yet. So that would be another reason to devote more time and resources to that effort. When the option of changing one's account surname was finally made available, one of the complaints was that due to the Coronavirus crisis, many wouldn't be able to afford it due to loss of income.

When asked when Premium Plus might be available, Grumpty answered that there were no guarantees, "but early 2021 is reasonable to expect."

Source: Modem World

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