An Appalling Graph

by Veyron — published on December 19th, 2007

As the grid is down right now, I took a look at the quality metrics for Second Life.  I think this graph, from the Linden’s own web site really says it all.   It really is appalling.  Over 1/5 of all Second Life sessions crash.  Maybe Cory needed to explain these numbers and couldn’t.  Notice how the trend is not really moving downward, sort of sideways.  Also look that this is over a one year time span.  One year to work on things and no substantial quality improvement.  But hey, we did get voice, and now lots of new shiny baubles to look at, um, until it crashes.  I do give Linden Labs kudos for putting up metrics like these and being open about it.

At some point, this graph will be a direct threat to Second Life’s and Linden Lab’s existence, if it is not already.  Philip Linden might think it’s a long road ahead to stability, I think it’s going to be a short road.  The number of active users has started to plateau now and now there is a risk of instability leading to disgust and then people leaving the environment.

Companies invariably do one of two things in general, they get bigger until a bigger fish eats them (or they become the top predator) or they get smaller until they disappear.  The question now is what is going to happen to Linden Labs/Second Life.

second life crashes

-Veyron

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 19th, 2007 at 3:49 pm and is filed under bug, crash. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. .

5 Responses to “An Appalling Graph”

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  1. Seraphine says:
    December 19th, 2007 at 6:13 pm

    This is a very high number- I didn’t know the crash number was that high. My opinion is SL should do a weekly reboot of the system. I don’t have any evidence to support this, but it seems SL is more stable after a reboot.

  2. Peter Stindberg says:
    December 20th, 2007 at 3:37 am

    I wonder if the “silent crashes” (the ones where the viewer does not say you crashed) count as well.

  3. theshadow says:
    December 20th, 2007 at 6:57 am

    I highly doubt it from my short time as a programmer… No response from the client is a null result, not an error (usually with at least a code or error message). But ehh… I don’t see anything saying how the numbers were generated…

  4. Garrett Larkham says:
    December 20th, 2007 at 11:15 am

    Voice and other “baubles” at the expense of reliability? Sounds like General Motors to me!

  5. Liberal Education Today - Post details: Second Life stalling in 2007? says:
    December 22nd, 2007 at 7:22 pm

    [...] others have written, service outages continue to be a problem, both planned and unplanned. From Second Life’s metrics [...]

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