Simcrashing Sunday

This weekend has been particularly bad for sim owners, who report multiple problems. Some have seen very poor performance from their sims, and have spent the weekend watching them crash, recover and then crash again. Others have noted that sim performance dips badly whenever an avatar tps into a location.

I visited one of the sims which has been having problems, and noticed that the physics FPS was varying wildly from 44.8 most of the time, with drops to 24 or 20 fps. I crashed about seven times on this sim. As it happens, it is an established sim where no substantial changes have been made recently, which has gone from being stable to crashing 16 or 17 times a day.

One sim owner reported on a group chat that she had had a reply from the support ticket that she filed, to say that the problems with her sim were not caused by her, but by problems with her server. Several others reported gaining no reply from the support tickets that they had filed.

Oclee and I started checking out sims around the grid, and all of them appeared to have problems with the physics fps dropping and time dilation too. Even NCC, which performs really well through a lot of grid weirdness, was showing the same drops in physics fps and some time dilation, although these actually didn’t seem to be causing any real problems.
We went from trying to diagnose the problem with our friend’s sim, in case something obvious was causing the problem, to feeling that it was probably wise to wait and see whether Linden Lab manages to solve it, as it seems clear that many people are experiencing the same difficulties.

It’s very frustrating however, if you are paying $195 or $295 real dollars a month for a sim and spending a great deal of time answering questions from customers about why your sim isn’t there, and why their products haven’t been delivered. It is doubly frustrating if everyone around you is complaining about similar problems, and nothing whatsoever appears on the Linden blog to indicate that there are problems with the grid. It is trebly frustrating if you are told to examine your scripts/collisions/textures/poseballs for causes, if you believe the problem to be caused by some centralised problem.

Some sim owners have reported increases in performance when they have disabled voice. Other’s have reported difficulties in disabling voice, with it still showing as available even when the owners think they have shut it off. I don’t presume to know whether voice is causing the problems. I really hope they locate the problem soon. People who rely on their SL income can ill afford to have their sims down or unusable for day after day.