Location: Warming my Hands by a Trash-fire While Somewhere in the Bowels of Linden Lab People Curse and Scream at Their Computers

At Educause this year, Claudia Linden became a bit tweaked when a conference participant remarked how Wednesdays in the Metaverse were notorious for system downtime. The entire Grid, and with it all business and socializing, would go offline for a few hours.

Claudia replied that Wednesdays were no longer black. True…now “rolling restarts” of regions have replaced taking the entire Grid offline.  But systemic events are common, and they tend to make all of us feel a bit uneasy about doing anything with real money in this fake world.  Consider this from last Tuesday:

In World Service Disruptions Under Investigation
Tuesday, March 25th, 2008 at 10:43 AM by: Teeple Linden

Some regions on the map are experiencing a slowdown or total disruption of essential in world services, including L$ transfers, mapping, and land transfers.  We’re still diagnosing.  We’ll follow this up with a worldwide shout: Please don’t attempt L$  or land transactions or transfer of valuable assets until we give an all-clear.

To avatars of my age, “all clear” reminds me of air-raid drills during the Cold War.  With Philip Rosedale planning to step down as the Linden Lab CEO, we may get a person more dedicated to stability and business online than changing the real world through a virtual one. 

We did, after a time, get this follow-up:

[UPDATE 11:37 a.m. Pacific] The Operations team has hunted the gremlin down. Thanks for your patience! We’ll follow this up with an in world announcement.

Gremlin?  I’m not geek enough to know what that means…I keep thinking of an awful-but-funky AMC car from the 1970s.

When I consider what it would be like for my brick-and-mortar stores, or even online ones, to say “no more purchases until we sound the all-clear signal,“ it occurs to me that a more business-minded I.T. exec may be JUST with Linden Lab needs now.  The Gremlins may not all be in the software…

And over the weekend, Wagner James Au reports that just as the concurrent number of avatars in-world passed 66,000 for the first time, the database on which SL works collapsed. The Lindens got it running again, but one wonders about missing inventory, lost monetary transactions, and so forth…

Be sure to check the “In a Strange Land” Archive for old posts

You’re showing our age, dude. *laugh*

I’ve not experienced this myself, not being in Second Life- my primary life is full to overflowing as it is- but as the metaverse expands and more people enter into it, it should not be at all surprising that the servers get overloaded and cranky.

Oh, and as for gremlins- don’t you remember the WWII era Bugs Bunny cartoon about the gremlin he had to face? Little guy with a face like Droopy (or like Jack Klugman, if you prefer) who kept intentionally messing everything up? Actually, I envision the current generations of gremlins to be 13 year old boys with haircuts that were last seen in the 70s (but now seem to be making a comeback for some inexplicable reason), running around and giggling as they pull on anything that can be pulled, bend things, dump soda wherever they can and generally behave like the nasty little twits they really are…

...but maybe that’s just me.

Post Your Comments:

Commenting is not available in this weblog entry.