Since the rollout of Second Life server 1.26 the already unreliable Second Life group-chat system showed an almost crippling drop in reliability, compared to the previous 1.25 release. Linden Lab have estimated an overall 60% drop in the number of group-chat messages successfully delivered, and the problem skews towards the larger groups, prompting many group owners to completely disable their group's chat functions to avoid online members from being spammed with error messages.

Linden Lab is reporting that server version 1.27, currently in quality assurance, represents a 300% improvement in group chat reliability over version 1.25 (or almost 1000% more reliable than what is currently operating on the Second Life grid today). As yet, no deployment date has been announced, but for many, the update cannot come soon enough.

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Linden Lab addresses Second Life group chat problems originally appeared on Massively on Wed, 01 Jul 2009 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Linden Lab's Frank Ambrose (FJ Linden) has issued another update on ongoing efforts to improve on the issues that have been a thorn in the side of Second Life users for some time. Ambrose points to the last four weeks as "a good stretch of grid stability" and implying that the only serious problems were confined to an approximately three hour period during the middle of the month.

This leaves us wondering whether he's talking about the same grid that we're familiar with, or if perhaps there's not some new definition of stability that we might have missed the press release for. The last four weeks has seen no less than 20 unplanned stability issues reported on the grid's status blog, and a number that went unreported there. That's not even counting the failed rollout of SLS1.25 simulator code, which caused additional difficulties -- or issues with ancillary services.

Continue reading Frank Ambrose updates on Second Life stability

Frank Ambrose updates on Second Life stability originally appeared on Massively on Fri, 05 Dec 2008 13:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Among all the current Second Life kerfuffle and protests going on about unexpected price-rises and policy changes surrounding certain categories of virtual land, it might have been forgotten that Vivox is preparing to release the SLim lightweight instant messenger system, and Linden Lab is preparing a Second Life viewer that is able to communicate with it.

The release of the former, and the first-look version of the latter appears to be very close now. We got our hands on both (as they appear to be available for download now), and took them for a bit of a spin to see how they might have improved over the demonstration versions that were temporarily available earlier this year.

Continue reading Hands-on with the new SLim release

Hands-on with the new SLim release originally appeared on Massively on Wed, 29 Oct 2008 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.