As I’ve been reporting in my weekly Simulator User Group meeting summaries and my Third-Party Viewer Developer meeting updates, there have been widespread issues with disconnects during region crossings – both via teleport and physical region crossings (e.g. via boat or aircraft or on foot).

Various theories have popped up over the weeks as to why the problem is occurring – with fingers most often being pointed at the server-side deployment of the Environment Enhancement Project (EEP). Whether or not EEP is responsible or not is hard to judge.

As I noted in my March 30th TPVD meeting notes, one of the problems with the issues is that they appear to strike randomly, and cannot be reproduced with any consistency; were a single cause behind them, it’s not unreasonable to assume that investigations would lead to a point where some degree of reproduction could be manifested.

It has been suggested by some users that de-rendering the sky (CTRL-ALT-SHIFT-6) before a teleport attempt can apparently ease the issue – although this is hardly a fix (and certainly no help to aviators and sailors), nor does it appear to work in all cases.

As trying to get to the root cause(s) of the problem is taking time, on Monday, April 8th, Linden Lab issued a blog post of their own on the matter, which reads in full:

Many Residents have noted that in the last few weeks we have had an increase in disconnects during a teleport. These occur when an avatar attempts to teleport to a new Region (or cross a Region boundary, which is handled similarly internally) and the teleport or Region crossing takes longer than usual. Instead of arriving at the expected destination, the viewer disconnects with a message like: Darn. You have been logged out of Second Life. You have been disconnected from the region you were in. We do not currently believe that this is specific to any viewer, and it can affect any pair of Regions (it seems to be a timing-sensitive failure in the hand-off between one simulator and the next). There is no known workaround – please continue logging back in to get where you were going in the meantime. We are very much aware of the problem, and have a crack team trying to track it down and correct it. They’re putting in long hours and exploring all the possibilities. Quite unfortunately, this problem dodged our usual monitors of the behaviour of simulators in the Release Channels, and as a result we’re also enhancing those monitors to prevent similar problems getting past us in the future. We’re sorry about this – we empathise with how disruptive it has been.

As noted, updates are being provided as available, through the various related User Group meetings, and I’ll continue to endeavour to reflect these through my relevant User Group meeting updates.