It’s been sixteen days, over which there has been (by my count) 53 hours of scheduled and unscheduled maintenance for the Second Life grid. That’s “drop what you’re doing and don’t touch nuthin’” maintenance, and doesn’t include the outages for in-world Search, payments, billing, the JIRA, or a couple abortive rolling restarts.

During this time, the grid hasn’t been performing well. All this, I know. What I don’t know is: Is it fixed yet?

Maybe it has been. Maybe it hasn’t been. Maybe there was one problem. Maybe there were several.

I do not fault Linden Lab’s response times to grid problems. I do not fault its dedication to restoring broken services as soon as possible. I do not fault its staff’s diligence or competence in handling these issues with verve, perspicacity, knowledge, skill, insight and the full awareness of the troubles that these problems cause the users when things go wrong.

I fault none of that. I believe that Linden Lab and its people do a sterling job in that regard. Pat yourselves on the back, ladies and gentlemen. Gold star for that.

What I do fault is Linden Lab’s seeming relentless inability to communicate clearly and thoroughly about it.

It’s like getting downtime reports from Helen Keller… in a sack.

We don’t know what went wrong; if multiple things went wrong; if we can expect it to keep going wrong; if it’s fixed; or if its still broken and only the current phase of the work is complete.

Grid instability is still up on what it was prior to all of this starting, so I’m guessing that it is not completely fixed… whatever it is.

But here’s my thing: I shouldn’t have to be guessing.

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Tags: Linden Lab / Linden Research Inc, Opinion, Second Life, Virtual Environments and Virtual Worlds