Second Life Traffic Numbers

For land and shop owners this is a serious problem. With the roll out of the latest update lots of people are seeing the problem.

Traffic Count in SL Search – enlarge

JIRA’s

SVC-7458Traffic counts borked across (All or Many Regions) – See 1. Second Life Viewer – VWR VWR-27621 Drop In Traffic Calculations. Nov 2011. Short not much information.

SVC-7459Drop In Traffic Calculations. Nov 2011. Updated Aug 2012. This seems to be the most active JIRA on the topic.

Dz Delicioso actually measured avatar time in regions Dz owns. Dz was seeing a 40% to 50% drop in traffic reported by the SL system. (Reference) Some were reporting huge drops in traffic stats, like 95%.

Some speculated that the Lindens had changed the traffic counting equations. They hadn’t. It was a bug like it most likely is now.

As of August 2, 2012 we started to see new comments on this issue.

SVC-8089Traffic Count not right at our sandbox at Amsterdam 2 sim.  July 2012. Update Aug 2012. Very little information in this item.

SVC-8099The traffic on the land is not showing up correctly in search places. July 2012. This is the big thread on the issue. Contribute any actionable information you have in this item. What the Lindens need to see is from WorkingOnIt Linden who added a comment – 30/Jul/12 12:15 PM:

If you are experiencing this issue, please comment with the following information in One new post. I know some of you have posted above and we appreciate it but this will allow us to triage your information in a faster manner. Please provide the following:

  • Region name
  • Parcel name
  • Expected traffic
  • Current traffic
  • Server version the region is on (this can be found under Help/About Second Life)

Please keep your comments to the following information only. Thank you!

Forum Posts

Traffic Counts? Anyone else seeing odd numbers….. – This leads to the JIRA’s and little else.

Pathfinding Q&A – This is long thread mostly about Pathfinding, but it has some information on Traffic Count problems.

Falcon Linden posted this in the thread:

We are investigating the dwell time issue[traffic count] but I can say with confidence that it was not directly related to pathfinding (although it may have been introduced as a merge-error/regression). We definitely are not trying to include NPCs in these calculations! The pathfinding team did not intentionally touch any code that relates to dwell time calculations.

By the way, pathfinding actually uses Havok 2012.1. The previous servers used Havok 2010.2. Havok 7 has not been on the grid in over a year (possibly more).

Blogs on It

Darius Gothly has a conspiracy rant out in: The Issue with Traffic. I’m not buying his take on what or why the Lindens are doing anything. His take is not fitting with my experience. But, his facts of what is happening are accurate. One just has to sort opinion and fact. Search sucks, fact. Traffic Count is broke, fact. It’s all a plot, speculation.

History

Looking in Grid Status this issue there: [RESOLVED] Traffic Reporting Issue. This is from November 2011. So, this is not the first time we have run into it.

Summary

While many people see everything in Second Life that the Lab does as related, it just isn’t. The traffic Count Problem is most likely a regression error that snuck in through the development process. This is such a common enough problem in the software development industry that it has a name.

If you have a problem, get your info into the JIRA SVC-8099.

8 thoughts on “Second Life Traffic Numbers

  1. I haven’t looked at search in a year. It just became way too frustrating and a huge time suck with never any results. I gave search a good once over again. My traffic seems fine but I can’t say for sure unless I actually tracked it for a whole day. With LL being so closed mouthed about everything, unless you hang out in the jira or goto useless meetings, It’s hardly worth the effort. Even if you could find any problems, is it really worth the jira headaches to say anything at all?

    It hard to imagine Search getting worse, but this seems to be the case. The ridiculous part is how obvious it is. The only bright spot for me that I saw, was Classifieds, but this is only cause their screwed up system seems to favor me if you use any 2 word search in classifieds that include the word animation. This is pretty funny as I’m spending a fraction of what I used to spend on classifieds. I’ll take what I can get tho.

    Does any of this really matter tho? LL destroyed search years ago, and now, just about every merchant now makes most of their money on the Marketplace. Considering how glitchy and messed up the Marketplace is, it’s not ideal to rely on it. Even my affiliate vendors bring in more than my inworld store. Heck, now, the only reason I keep my sim is that I can’t imagine going back to renting land for my store. Plus, I like having all the land to test and create on. Beyond these reasons, I’d not lose much if I just kept a few vendors on a small parcel and sold the sim. Actually, I’d gain a couple hundred a month.

    Wake me up when LL get’s a clue how to run a search engine in a virtual world. I guarantee that if they ever do fix it, concurrency will got immediately back to 2009 levels. This is when I was ranked in the top 10 for the word animation.

    • Unfortunately you are pretty much right.

      If one is not going to file JIRA and pay attention to what is going on, I think one loses the right to bitch. But, that my opinion, so don’t let it stop you from exercising you free speech rights.

      I disagree on the effectiveness of UG meetings. I have been in some that were hopelessly mismanaged, Adult Content for one. I’ve been in others I think were highly effective; Scripting Kelly’s, Oskar’s and Andrew’s, and Pathfinding. Mesh with Charlar and now Nyx is another good group. Oz’s is a mix and I say mix because I wish he would deal more with SL Viewer issues. Geenz Content Improvement is different and think the form of UG’s to come. We’ll see how that works. But, I think it shows what users with good communication skills and a decent working relationship with the Lindens can accomplish, I hope it accomplishes… jury is still out on accomplishment part, but things take time.

  2. Actually, I should correct myself. My traffic is way off today. My scripted traffic counter says I’ve had 71 actual visitors, but my SL traffic count is only 203, which means less than 3 minutes per person. That’s got to be way off.

  3. OK, so everyone has been calling the new code “Havok 7”, and it isn’t.

    Why didn’t they notice? Working hypothesis: nobody reads the forums, and Oskar Linden is a bot.

  4. What do you mean, you don’t believe my “Conspiracy Theory”?? Oh I see, they got to you too, huh? I knew it!! You’re one of THEM now!! 😉

    LOL Thank you for the link Nalates. (And besides, Conspiracy Theories are fun to fiddle with too.)

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