Second life client instabilities keep coming and coming

This is getting ridiculous. The server issues are bad enough, but the client bugs are getting ridiculous. Windows so far remains the most stable of the three supported operating systems. I’ve tested with all three, but with each minor version increase in the clients, the instabilities become more apparent and more timely.

Let’s take a look at each client in its native environment.

Windows: Not really anything to say here. It seems that this is where the majority of the client testing takes place since this is the one with the fewest client crashes, and it doesn’t seem to chew up resources and not release them (memory leak). There usually isn’t too many issues with the Windows clients and I personally have not encountered too many issues with the latest 1.15(2).

Mac: 1.13 probably was the most stable of the few I’ve had a chance to try. 1.14 was better. 1.15(2)? Terrible. So far, I’ve lost count as to how many times the client has crashes MacOSX 10.4 (Tiger) with nothing else running. The client was just launched, and the avatar sits there. Doing nothing. And then bam… crash. Actually, before I lost count, I think I was up to fifteen or so. In one instance, I crashed three times within a period of ten minutes. Again, nothing going on. Now that’s pretty bad testing if the client is crashing that often and you haven’t tested it thoroughly enough to let new versions pass.

Linux: Of all of the versions, 1.13 was the most stable by far. 1.13 on an ATI Radeon 9600, with a Pentium 4 with 1.5G ram and only Second Life running ran smooth as silk even as an alpha. No client crashes, no memory leaks that were noticeable. In 1.14, there was a tremendous memory leak in the client. This was pointed out in the alpha testers forum and a few of the testers even went through the trouble of debugging it and finding a potential cause for the problem. Obviously this was ignored, since the memory leak remained in the 1.15(2) client. A simple way to tell there was a memory leak? You launched only the client in X Windows. If your client is running smoothly at the beginning, then an hour later it skips frames and your resources are all but gone, then you know that the only application that’s being used is basically hogging all of the resources.

Unfortunately, this seems to be happening more and more. Of all of this, you would imagine that the Linux client shouldn’t work being an alpha version. But it does (which is fabulous). The Mac client however should be a bit more stable than it is. All of this ties back to the way a professional corporation should be handling the code release. Don’t put out new features if you haven’t fixed the bugs in the old. It’s the crappy but necessary part of development that all developers dread but do. Customer service goes a very long ways and if you keep ignoring your end user, then it just creates a tremendously large gap for competitors to fit through without any effort on their end.

I suppose it’s tiring with all the issues and problems. But you know what the worst part is? Many of the users are getting used to the bad code and bug developments. We’re almost to the point of not wondering if there is a stable release coming out and just taking the bugs for granted. And you know that if your users are on that end of the spectrum, it isn’t very far off that they’ll reach the fine line of just giving it up altogether. Is that what Linden Lab wants? At this point, who knows.

Update (1): I forgot to mention that if you’re running a Mac, the current OS version os 10.4 (Tiger). Most users will use VirtueDesktops in light of not having any virtual desktop capability until 10.5 (Leopard). If you are loading the Second Life client or it’s trying to teleport somewhere, do NOT switch your desktop. Wait until it’s completely loaded. If you don’t wait, this will result in a client crash. It can be reproduced since 1.13. Figured I’d throw it out now since it hasn’t been fixed yet.

Update (2): Admittedly, I didn’t provide the version of Mac as pointed out by Eloise.  Sorry about that, thanks for pointing it out.  Macbook Pro Intel Core 2 Duo, 3G Ram, ATI Radeon X1600 (256 Ram).  Max resolution 1680 x 1050.   Although in defense of those of us that have crashing clients, it is pretty black and white.  If your version previous didn’t crash, and the one current is crashing, that means that your new code that you introduced is causing a bug.  If you rewrote from scratch the whole client, then that’s a whole other beast when it comes to code since all of your code is for sake of better term, “new”.