At 5:10pm SLT (US Pacific) Search > Places and teleportation went off the air, though sim border crossings and logins seem to be working as usual. There are some suggestions that inworld Instant Messaging may have partially failed as well, but that is harder to check. Additionally there are reports of the map acting up.
No word from Linden Lab on this one, yet. But there's no easy way to report this to them so they may not be aware of the problem yet. This failure does not come at a peak period. We're currently on the slide downwards, about 3 hours after peak load.
[Update (5:40pm): After 30 minutes of issues, teleportation has started working again, and Search > Places started returning results a couple minutes later.]
At approximately 3AM SLT today, most of the problems from yesterday returned in one form or another, according to reports. By 4AM there were an increasing number of reports of failed transactions, problems rezzing objects, unusually high packet-loss and failures to teleport. What you might think of as the usual suspects.
Linden Lab gave an update on the issues at 8:35AM, but issues have continued throughout the day without any announced resolution. That said the symptoms of the problems that people are having seem to be much milder than usual -- that is not to say that the effects are not severe, just that fewer people are experiencing them.
[Update: 8:45 AM 8 January - Linden Lab marks this issue as resolved]
Through the day today the routing issues, which began early this-morning, continue to be a problem. The inability for some servers to communicate with each-other is causing widespread teleport failures, slow object rezzing, issues with teleportation failures and stalled upload queues that are causing sims to choke and restart.
Linden Lab reports that they have been working on it as a priority item all day, and are continuing to try to stabilize as many regions as possible. It is not entirely clear whether this is an issue with the work done to the networks recently, or whether it is a new issue in Linden Lab's new communications backbone system. These issues are also reportedly affecting the Teen Grid.
All we can do at this stage is cross our fingers and hope that they can get it together.
[Update 4:41 SLT: Chadrick Linden reports that the problem has been found and fixed and that things will return to normal soon]
The Second Life grid is experiencing login and teleportation problems that apparently commenced sometime after 2am SLT. There's just enough detail in Chadrick Linden's post on the matter to point to routing problems between the two colocation facilities, citing that "During this time, a significant portion of the Second Life grid will not be able to be teleported to".
That would be consistent with the two colocation facilities being unable to communicate directly with each-other, even though Second Lifers can communicate (mostly) with either. Under the 1.9 (and later) communications model, simulators need to be able to interconnect between themselves to allow teleportation. Sloppy or impeded interconnect can also lead to login and a wide variety of presence issues.
[Update: 3:55AM SLT, this issue is reported to be resolved]
Jean Linden reports that Linden Dollar balances are not updating properly for some while after logging in and that there are reports of failures in search and teleportation mechanics. These issues "are being investigated", and may well be load-related, though with 17,000 residents on the grid right now, the load should be relatively stable.
Only one of these systems has any connection to the new communications protocols, so the odds of these issues being connected to issues with the new protocols are low.
Only one day after Cory Linden's announcement of the future use of alternative, open protocols between the Second Life viewer (client) and the Second Life grid (server), and Zero Linden has announced that they've had all the code in for it for a month and are switching it on for tentative trial today.
No update in the grid software and no new viewer are required. This code's been lurking in the bowels of things for a while, getting workouts from the QA. This is based off the same capabilities system that apparently was developed for the third-party registration system, and (we're guessing) likely ties in with the backbone concept that Cory Linden discussed yesterday. All of it is apparently based on open Internet standards.
What does this all mean for us? Apparently that there will be changes (hopefully improvements) in teleportations, sim-border crossings, map download and display and file uploads. Fingers crossed.
Blue Linden reports that the Second Life grid is experiencing a presence issue. If you log out, you may not be able to log back in, because - the system hasn't apparently noticed that you're gone yet. The advice is that if you are unable to log back in, wait 30 minutes then contact Customer Support.
The presence system has had a bit of a fraught history, particularly since the day Second Life 1.9 was deployed. Formerly teleportation, sim-border-crossings, instant messages, group invitations and vote-proposals were handled through central servers. Then those servers started to get busier and busier. It was decided, in the interests of scalability, that sims should communicate with each-other in a more direct fashion.
At 5:10pm SLT (US Pacific) Search > Places and teleportation went off the air, though sim border crossings and logins seem to be working as usual. There are some suggestions that inworld Instant Messaging may have partially failed as well, but that is harder to check. Additionally there are reports of the map acting up.
At approximately 3AM SLT today, most of the problems from yesterday returned in one form or another, according to reports. By 4AM there were an increasing number of reports of failed transactions, problems rezzing objects, unusually high packet-loss and failures to teleport. What you might think of as the usual suspects.
The Second Life grid is experiencing login and teleportation problems that apparently commenced sometime after 2am SLT. There's just enough detail in Chadrick Linden's post on the matter to point to routing problems between the two colocation facilities, citing that "During this time, a significant portion of the Second Life grid will not be able to be teleported to".
Jean Linden reports that Linden Dollar balances are not updating properly for some while after logging in and that there are reports of failures in search and teleportation mechanics. These issues "are being investigated", and may well be load-related, though with 17,000 residents on the grid right now, the load should be relatively stable.
Only one day after Cory Linden's announcement of the future use of alternative, open protocols between the Second Life viewer (client) and the Second Life grid (server), and Zero Linden has announced that they've had all the code in for it for a month and are switching it on for tentative trial today.
