Toysoldier Thor has been relentlessly tracking down the causes of his in-world event crashes and sudden massive lag. Region owners and event managers have been collecting and providing data on the problem in the forum. See my previous article: New Lag Problem. See the forum thread here: Major Increase in Instant SIM LAG & Crash during large events.
Simon Linden acknowledged the effort and is starting to get people on the trail of the problem. From Toysoldier:
From Simon Linden…
” Thanks for the reports, Toy … there’s some good information there that seems to shows the simulator getting into trouble when there are network problems. ”I think now that we have a possible smoking gun… the LL staff can focus their investigation on the NETWORK.
Having more sim /region owners post the same performance statistics during one of these extreme lag events would help us further confirm the root cause.
If you are seeing this problem, read the thread and post the requested information from your occurrence of the event. Filing a JIRA works too.
This “sudden lag” problem may be due to a LL issue or it may be due to a griefer who has found a hole in the LL server code. When this happens, agent time spikes and seems to be the primary cause of system degradation. In an event yesterday, an avatar named RamonZita was admitedly griefing the sim. S/he has been terrorrizing many events recently. Could it be possible that s/he has been able to develop a viewer that will trick the server to do a massive amount of agent updates thereby lagging the sim?
It is possible. In toy’s thread on Sudden Massive Lag the comments do lead to one aspect of the problem being griefer related. But, another direction the thread is leading is toward a network problem. I think Toy’s efforts have gotten the Lindens’ attention and I thin the recent network test by Oskar may be related to the problem.
If it is greifer related, we aren’t going to hear about… the Lindens treat griefers with silence, which is probably a smart thing to do.