More Wobbles…rollback

“Torrid” doesn’t seem to go near to describing the experience of being at the coal-face of Secondlife at the moment. Yesterday’s aborted rollout of new region-crossing code suggests that either the central hardware outage caused a far more severe rollback on some servers than Linden Lab are currently admitting, or that the “scheduled maintenance” that is currently blighting some US residents’ primetime needs more “support” than it is getting.

We are used to occasional “oops” moments in SL, they are a part of virtual life, like it or lump it, but the current crop of failures is bringing back haunting memories of my first few months in SL in 2008 when Grid stability could be measured in hours rather than days.

There have been rumours, and I emphasise that, that Linden Lab had out-sourced some core-server maintenance to a sub-contractor. This hapless sub-contractor did not appreciate the impact some of their work was to have on the programme and all Hell broke loose. If that was so it was very unwise of Linden Lab’s managers to allow such practices, since Secondlife is a notoriously unstable and complex beast. Just how long it will take Linden Lab to bring SL back to where it was at the beginning of March this year remains to be seen, but I can only hope that THIS TIME the lesson has been learnt.

~ by Ayesha Askham-Ezvalt on May 10, 2012.