A Laggy Problem at Foxworth

Recently, the lag at my home sim at Foxworth became particuarly bad, just after January 20. Sim owner Foxyfurman Kumani was among the first to notice, saying he found he was barely moving, and the only others in the sim at the time were five in the Mayan Casino, “It was not long after a Linden Lab restart of the sim.”

Explaining the problem in a group notice, “The first two calls I had to Linden Lab were a total waste of time. One suggestion (of theirs) was to restart the sim. (laughter) Okay, this did not work. The other was to look at our top scripts. We already did this, and even returned new scripts that had been put out during the period of time when the problem started. We tried turning off scripts section by section (in the sim) with no positive results.”

Both his sim manager Aiko Swashbuckler and the sim technician Leonarris Orsini helped Foxyfurman in looking for the problem. Not having found anything, Aiko asked everyone living in the sim to stop tinkering with scripts. But as it turned out, none of the tenants was behind the problem either, “no one in Foxworth did anything to cause this.”

So what caused the intermittent lag? Leonarris did some investigating and finally found the source on Friday Jan 29. The problem was the way sims are stored within Linden Lab’s servers. A sim doesn’t have to be physically next to others on the map and Grid to cause problems. If two sims next to another in storage, what happens in one can affect the other. Aiko explained Foxworth was one of “ several sims on one server” with “three Class Five ones. One of our ‘neighbors’ on the same (server) was running a Shoutcast server farm business.” Foxy went on, “a new place just came online a week or so ago. ... It is so laggy that you can’t even walk at that place, and it is sucking resources from the machine. ... Linden Labs knows of the problem and will fix the recourse allocation or move us to another (server).” He stated Foxworth’s place on the map would not be changed, at most it would “just run on a different machine.”

The following day, Foxy made another group notice, “Linden Lab has moved the offending sim to another server. if you have noticed, you can move now and walk and fly, all good things. Thanks to everyone who helped, and those who suffered the lag along with us.” And everyone was in complete agreement, “it was a nightmare,” “yeah that Shoutcast thing was crap, I'm glad they took care of it so fast,” “Indeed, the lag was horrid. O.o “

And so, peace and harmony was restored to our little corner of the Metaverse.

Bixyl Shuftan