Second Life performance improves, but residents don’t feel it
By Eric Reuters
SECOND LIFE, Dec 18 (Reuters) - In a speech before the faithful at the Second Life Community Convention last August, Linden Lab chief Philip Rosedale apologized for the poor performance of the Second Life Grid and pledged to make reliability his company’s top priority.
While Linden Lab has made incremental gains in performance, statistics released on Monday show most residents have been experiencing a steady decline in the quality of Second Life’s environment since April.
Linden Lab measures in-world performance with three metrics: the frames per second (FPS) a Second Life server delivers, the FPS experienced by users at their computers, and the likelihood that the Second Life software will end abnormally, or “crash.” When FPS on either the server or client dips, Second Life residents experience a “jaggy” effect that can make simple operations like walking or typing difficult.
Server-side FPS, the metric most directly under Linden’s control, has shown a boost in performance in recent months. The percentage of Second Life regions delivering below 35 frames per second, the threshold at which Linden says they become noticeable, has improved from 4 percent in August to 2.5 percent in November.
Servers delivering below 20 frames, regions Linden says are “very slow and laggy,” dropped from 0.9 percent in August to 0.4 percent last month.
But Linden Lab also measures the FPS generated on residents’ computers by the viewing software, and even as servers on the Second Life Grid deliver better performance, for most users the quality of their experience has been worsening. In April the average resident experienced 13.5 FPS on their computer. That number has been declining almost every month to a median 12.3 FPS in November.
The performance of the Second Life client hinges on a number of factors, including both the efficiency of the viewer software release and the capability of home computers. “Upgrading to a faster or recommended graphics cards and system will often result in the biggest improvement to your viewer frame rate,” Linden Lab advises.
While the viewer software has been getting slower, it’s also getting more stable. In November, 21.5 percent of Second Life sessions ended in a crash, Linden Lab’s best month on record. (The
crash rate also measures sessions in which a computer is turned off or goes to sleep without a log-off.) By comparison, 24.4 percent of sessions in May ended in a crash.
Many residents remain loyal to Second Life despite the performance problems. “Without question SL performance, logins and general functionality has dipped,” said avatar Tabitha Oxide, a Second Life user since September 2006.
Oxide, who declined to reveal her real name, said growing pains are to be expected of any service that has grown as rapidly as Second Life. “I’m grateful it actually works as well it does.”
In November, in a post on the official Linden Blog titled “Long Road Behind, Long Road Ahead” Rosedale recalled the rush to get Second Life operational before his startup ran out of venture capital. “We figured (correctly) that this was a very large software project, and that if we tried to carefully design it all up front, we wouldn’t even come close to getting something working before we ran out of money,” Rosedale said.
“Stability is what we’ve got to be all about in the first half of 2008, at the cost of other work,” Rosedale said.
