How to Report an Offline Region

If a sim crashes, or if Linden Lab performs a "rolling reboot" of the grid, it usually only takes 5-10 minutes for the sim to come back online. If you discover that your sim has been offline for more than a few minutes, Linden Lab may need to be notified of the problem. They have a special support queue just for offline region notifications, and they usually handle them within an hour.

If you are an estate manager on one of our sims, you have the ability to file these support requests on your own, which should be helpful if I or one of my estate managers is offline.

How to file a support request:

1. Go to the Second Life web site and click Login.
2. Enter your username and password, and then click Login.
3. Once you're on the Dashboard page, click Help > Support.
4. On the right side of the screen, click Submit a Support Case.
   
   Note
   If you don't see the "Submit a Support Case" link, you should see a "Contact Support" link instead. Click Contact Support, and then on the next page, click Submit a Support Case. You can also try this link right here.
5. On the Submit a Case screen, select Land & Region under "What type of problem are you having?"
6. Under "Land & Region," select Report an offline Region.
7. Under "Please provide the region name," enter the complete, correct name of the sim.
8. The "If there is any additional information" box is required, for some reason. Just type anything there, so long as it's polite!
9. Scroll down and click Submit.
10. You will get an email immediately, indicating they have received your support request. You will also get an email once they have resolved the problem.

If you are unable to contact Support, please let me know!

Second Life's Endangered Spaces

Linden Lab's October announcement that they were planning to significantly raise prices on openspace islands sure caused a stir. Some rental estates evicted their tenants and shut down immediately. Others began deleting their openspaces as they became vacant. After a good week of listening to feedback (AKA "rage") from the community, the Lab came up with a plan to introduce a new land product called Homesteads, which are approved for residential use. These new homesteads will be priced higher than today's openspaces, but for the first six months of 2009, the price will be significantly lower than the outrageous amount they were asking in the October dramabomb.

Even though the new prices are being phased in, and the initial increase isn't that huge, at this time a number of great openspace builds have already been shut down as a result of last week's blog post, and I know of a number of other public builds which were scheduled to be shut down soon, last I heard. Over the weekend I was listening to a song by The Dears, and some of the sentiments it expressed really related to my feelings about the whole openspace controversy. I spent Sunday and Monday teaching myself how to use Sony Vegas Movie Studio, then I traveled around the grid looking for cool openspace sims to photograph. This was a bit of a hassle because Windlight blows my computer up. I crashed 9 or 10 times collecting the snapshots used in the film.

I posted at both the forums I frequent, requesting snaps of other folks' openspace sims, but hardly anyone responded. (Those who did are credited in the video.) Oh- I also want to thank the avatar Detect Surface for letting me use a couple pics of the gorgeous but now defunct Sector 66 build.

Anyway, here's the movie.

Performance Comparison: Openspace Sims versus Regular Sims

There has been endless conjecture on the Second Life forums about the true capacity of openspace sims versus their "full sim" counterparts. We know that up to four class 5 openspace sims run on a single core in a four-processor Second Life server, whereas regular sims each have their own dedicated core/processor. This generally means that up to 16 openspace sims will run on a single physical server, versus 4 regular sims. It is assumed (but I don't know whether anyone has confirmed) that regular sims and openspaces run on different servers; that you won't see a mix of openspaces and full sims on the same box. We also know that openspace sims are allocated less physical memory per instance than a full sim. But in terms of actual, tangible data, we don't have much else.

Residents with a lot of experience on both kinds of sims seem to agree that script performance is generally worse on openspaces, and that sometimes openspaces can experience "mystery lag" in the absence of any obvious cause. (It is thought that this is due to the increased number of "server neighbors" that openspaces have.)

I have conducted a series of tests on two class 5 sims, one openspace, and one regular sim. While the tests do not address the differences between how the presence of avatars or intensive physics operations affect sims, they do provide some insight into the script capabilities of the two kinds of servers, and hint at the effects of server neighbors.

Testing Methods

• All benchmarks were performed by running the Standard test suite on Mysti's Benchmark Sim Tester v1.1 by Mystical Cookie. The benchmark tester performs a number of specific script-intensive tasks and calculates an overall score based on how quickly the sim performs each task. In all cases, lower times and scores are better. Note that all tests were done under Second Life server version 1.22.4.90499, over the weekend of July 19-20 2008.
  
• To eliminate variance caused by avatars visiting the sim, access to the sim was limited only to my personal group, and I would teleport away after beginning tests.
• To keep any attachments from interfering with the tests, I visited the islands in "Test Female" form, which includes no HUDs or other attachments.
• Both islands are standalone sims with no other adjacent regions, meaning they weren't sharing any data with other sims, and were not subject to the performance hit of "child agents" from nearby sims.
• To account for any variation due to "server neighbors" (other sims sharing the same physical server as a sim undergoing testing), I restarted each sim after performing each test, and I tested each case (empty versus object-populated) three times. Any visible spike in a given test metric could likely be attributed to laggy server neighbors during that particular round of tests.
• For the object-populated tests, I placed an identical selection of items in each sim. I chose items that I knew from experience as a landlord use a fair amount of script time. For example, temp rezzers, disco balls, and texture-cycling prims. (I did not want to shame any designers in this post, so I am not publishing my list of specific items. I can provide the list upon request.)
  
• Before choosing which items I'd use for the object-populated tests I visited a random sample of 10 of my own openspace sims to see how many scripts the average occupant was running, and what the average "Script Perf" metric was. The script performance metric indicates how many script instructions per second are being executed on the sim, and is the most important number to watch when trying to determine the general script activity on a given island. I kept placing scripted items on my test openspace sim until I had reached the average Script Perf number. I then duplicated this build on the regular sim.
• While it likely doesn't have any bearing on the test results, both sims had identical parcel and estate settings, as well as the same terrain (default island design #2). I also set my client to Low graphics settings so the sim wasn't burdened sending a lot of object data to me like happens when view distance is turned way up.

Summary of Results
You can examine my raw data here. The results I present below are the average scores for each battery of tests. Note that the "Empty" score for a given test is for when the tests were run with no objects other than the tester itself in the sim, and the "With Objects" score is for tests run with objects in placed (the exact same set of objects in each sim).

Regular sim (lower scores are better)

• Mysti Score: Empty - 1,600, With Objects - 1,661
• Rez Check: Empty - 0:00, With Objects - 0:00
• For Loops: Empty - 3:24, With Objects - 3:30
  
• Lists: Empty - 3:56, With Objects - 4:03
• Link Msgs A: Empty - 3:43, With Objects - 3:49
• Link Msgs B: Empty - 3:42, With Objects - 3:49
• Encryption: Empty - 6:12, With Objects - 6:33
• Object Chat: Empty - 5:36, With Objects - 5:50
• Land Scan: Empty - 0:04, With Objects - 0:04
• Total Time: Empty - 0:26:40, With Objects - 0:27:41

Openspace sim (lower scores are better)

• Mysti Score: Empty - 1,495, With Objects - 4,397
• Rez Check: Empty - 0:00, With Objects - 0:00
• For Loops: Empty - 3:00, With Objects - 8:40
  
• Lists: Empty - 3:35, With Objects - 10:42
• Link Msgs A: Empty - 3:44, With Objects - 10:37
• Link Msgs B: Empty - 3:44, With Objects - 12:09
• Encryption: Empty - 5:10, With Objects - 14:49
• Object Chat: Empty - 5:36, With Objects - 16:09
• Land Scan: Empty - 0:03, With Objects - 0:08
• Total Time: Empty - 0:24:54, With Objects - 1:13:16

Observations

• After I had set up the duplicate builds on both islands and confirmed that each island had the same number of prims and scripts running, I immediately noticed that the openspace sim had a "Script Perf" rating three times higher than the full sim (14249 to 4590). Since full sims are supposedly more powerful than openspaces, I had expected the regular sim to be the busier one, since it would have more processing power to devote to scripts. But I wonder if this means that openspaces are tweaked to devote more of their resources for script processing than full sims are, since script performance is the most obvios limitation of openspaces? The benchmarking results would seem to corroborate this theory, as the openspace sim actually fared better than the regular sim in the "empty sim" tests.
  
• After every sim restart, I recorded the sim ID and IP address as reported by Help > About Second Life. By doing this I confirmed that after every restart both the sim ID and IP address did change. (There had recently been some conjecture that user-initiated restarts did not move the sim to a different server, but these tests prove that sims do in fact move when restarted by residents.) Note that I did not restart either sim between tests 3 and 4, as indicated by the raw data. This way, when you look at the last empty test results (test 3) and compare them to the first "with objects" results (test 4), you know that any difference in score is due to the object/script placement, not a change in server neighbors.
  
• In one case, my regular sim actually jumped to a different co-location facility! I confirmed this by doing a tracert on the old and new IP addresses. This was very surprising and isn't necessarily good news for estate owners with lots of adjacent sims, as border-crossings between sims in different co-location facilities can be painful.
• The regular sim tests did not indicate any major issues related to external factors (server neighbors?), as there is rarely as much as 6 seconds of variation on the score for any individual test. The difference across test passes was more pronounced with the openspace sim (the shortest test pass was almost 17 minutes shorter than the longest one), which may indeed confirm the theory that openspace sims are more likely to suffer the effects of laggy server neighbors.
  
• The additional script load on the full sim during the "with objects" tests had only a trivial impact on the sim. The average total test pass for the full sim was only a minute longer when the sim was populated with objects. This is in stark contrast to the nearly 300% performance hit the openspace sim took under the exact same script load.
• Even though the openspace sim scored significantly more poorly on the "with objects" tests than the regular sim, its dilation was generally 0.99-1.0, sim FPS was routinely 44-45, and the sim was easy to navigate with my attachment-less Test Female avatar. This is good because it means that while script performance in a given openspace might be sub-par, the sim itself can still be perfectly usable, so long as script responsiveness is not a major factor in one's enjoyment.
  

Conclusions
Based on the final results, I believe we can safely conclude the following:

• Since an empty openspace sim actually performs a little better than an empty regular sim on the script benchmarks, it appears that openspaces are tweaked to allocate more processing power to scripts to make up for their inadequacies.
• When running under a normal script load (based on a sample of currently-in-use openspace sims), script performance of a class 5 openspace sim is nearly 1/3 the performance of a regular sim. (Hey, it could be worse!)
• Since the "with objects" tests barely affected the full-sized sim's results, while they profoundly affected the openspace sim's final numbers, it's clear that full-sized sims have a lot more headroom for script processing; these tests didn't even touch a regular sim's threshold.
  
• Unless the large discrepency with test 5 on the openspace sim is attributable to some other factor (running on newer/faster hardware than the other tests?) the influence of server neighbors (other sims residing on the same physical server), seems able to have a non-trivial effect on openspace sims, while the interference appears to be less marked on full sims.
• Performing a user-initiated restart on a sim (openspace or full) does land the sim on another physical server most (if not all) of the time, and may even land you in another co-location facility.
  
• Even though the openspace sim scored poorly compared to the regular sim once scripted objects were added to the mix, the fact that sim FPS and time dilation remained admirably high shows that an openspace sim can still be perfectly usable and otherwise "healthy" even as script performance begins to suffer.
  

Work Remaining
These tests primarily focused on raw script performance and the influence of server neighbors, and did not cover things like intensive physics operations or anything related to avatars. I am not personally equipped (or motivated) to investigate these avenues, but I hope someone else out there is. *winks*

Island Moves and Profile Picks

Considering how congested the grid has become, it's no wonder that some estate owners choose to take advantage of Linden Lab's undocumented policy of moving entire estates for free if they are surrounded by other islands or reservations in such a way that expansion is impossible. Unfortunately, while you may not be paying $150 USD per island to relocate your estate if you choose to do this, the move does come at a cost: After the move, any profile picks entries that residents may have had to parcels on your islands will be invalidated- to an extent. What follows is a summary of exactly what breaks and what doesn't, and the potential impact on any businesses that might be located on your islands.

Two Kinds of Profiles
First off, you must understand that at this time, Second Life maintains two profiles for every resident. There is the old-style "Full Profile" that you see when you use Search > Places, and then the newer "HTML Profile" that's used when you use the Search > All feature or conduct Second Life searches from the web. (Here is the HTML profile for the famous builder, Light Waves.)

HTML Profiles only contain information from the 2nd Life and Picks tabs of the Full Profile, and are indexed by Linden Lab's search appliances and factored into search rankings in Search > All and web-based searches. Full Profiles contain a lot more information and changes in them are reflected immediately in Search > People results, whereas it can sometimes take days before the changes are reflected in Search > All.

To business owners, the primary effect of HTML profiles is that any Picks entries that payment-info-on-file residents have to their businesses help boost their rankings in Search > All results, even more than Traffic.

I should also note that in a similar manner to resident profiles, places in Second Life have two listings: The Search > Places listing and the HTML listing. The HTML listing works just the same for places as the HTML profile does for residents.

What Breaks
You will see different results, depending on which search method you use to look at someone's profile:

• If you use Search > Places to view a person's profile and look at their Picks tab, the picks to moved locations that were created before the island move will appear to be intact (they won't say "no parcel" like stale picks often do), however when you attempt to teleport to them, you'll be greeted with the following error: "Could not teleport. Unable to find teleport destination. The destination may be temporarily unavailable or no longer exists. Please try again in a few minutes."
• If you use Search > All to find the person's profile, and instead of clicking the picks link on the HTML page, you click View Full Profile and look the the Picks tab, you will have the same problem.

What Still Works

• If you use Search > All to find the person's profile, and you click the picks link on the HTML page, you will actually be taken to the HTML listing for the place in question. You will successfully be able to teleport from the HTML listing.
• Search rankings are not immediately affected. The island move does not cause Second Life to generate a new HTML listing for parcels on the moved island. As evidence of this, see the following:
  
  The roleplaying location, Space Colony Necronom VI is located on an estate which was recently relocated. Here is the HTML Picks link from a resident's profile that was created before the island move:
  
  http://world.secondlife.com/place/7e3ae773-065e-3ddc-6026-9eee462eb4ea
  
  And here is the link from another resident who added the place to her Picks after the move:
  
  http://world.secondlife.com/place/7e3ae773-065e-3ddc-6026-9eee462eb4ea
  
  The links are identical, and take you to the same page. This means that Search > All is oblivious to island moves, which is a good thing.
  

What This Means to Businesses
Profile Picks can influence your business in a number of ways, some more subtle than others:

• Your search rankings will not immediately be affected. You will have some time to get some new residents to update their Picks before the change begins to make an effect on Search > All results. (Picks do not factor into Search > Places results.)
• Residents who use Search > All exclusively will not see a difference. If you stick to the HTML profiles when browsing people's picks, you won't even know that anything changed.
• Residents who use Search > People or who click View Full Profile from an HTML Profile might think that your business no longer exists. The misleading wording of the error message they get if they attempt to follow a pick to your place could prompt some folks to go elsewhere. Remember that Picks are a great, free "soft advertising" campaign. People might discover your business through other folks' picks, and may not have ever heard about it otherwise.
  
• Residents who discover their own picks are broken will likely remove the malfunctioning pick from their profile, but might forget to add a new one after the move. This may have a gradual negative impact on your Search > All rankings if no one new adds picks to your place.

Advice for Estate Owners
While the effect of island moves on profile picks is mitigated by the fact that HTML profiles still work, it can affect traffic at the businesses on your islands, and the effects might be slow and gradual as residents weed out broken links from their profiles. If other businesses rent land on your islands, you should warn them about the consequences so they can notify their info groups and friends to update their profiles after the move.

I have been in contact with Linden Lab about this topic, and it sounds like they will be documenting this problem as a known side-effect of an island move- but don't expect a fix any time soon.

Openspace Survival Guide

The concierge team is still very swamped with Openspace orders, and the process for handling these orders is rather clunky and error-prone. Here are some tips for getting your tickets handled as quickly and problem-free as possible. I'm assuming that you already know what an Openspace sim is, and you're familiar with the changes in the program:

PICKING A LOCATION
If you want your island to be placed near one of your existing islands, this is the most frustrating part of the process- for many reasons. First of all, even though you can't yet order Openspaces through the Land Store, you still have to use it to determine where it's safe to put your island. Unfortunately, the Land Store sucks in so many ways that I don't even want to get into it. I'll just tell you what you need to do:

1. Go to the Land Store and click 'Manage Existing Reservations.' This should bring you to a list of islands that you've previously ordered from the Land Store. (If all your existing islands were bought from other residents, you probably won't see anything here, unfortunately...)
2. Click the Location entry for one of your islands. This will center the map over the island you picked. Take note of the selected island's coordinates and look for any memorable 'landmarks' in the surrounding area that you can use to find your way back later on.
3. Now click 'Return to the Land store' and wait a few seconds for all the reservations (the yellow blocks) to load.
4. Before doing anything else, look for ANY blue (ocean) cell on the grid that isn't touching an existing reservation or island, and wait a few seconds to see whether you get the "This Space is Available" message. You may have to do this many times because the Land Store map is at least 9 months out-of-date, and many of the cells that look empty actually have islands on them now. (I own 12 islands now and only 3 show up on the Land Store map.)
5. Take note of the coordinates in the "This Space is Available" message and use that as a guide to start navigating toward your desired location. Remember that the grid coordinates increase from Left-to-Right and from Down-to-Up (not Up-to-Down). If you've got really fast eyes, you can sometimes see the coordinates in reserved or already-built cells by watching the status bar at the bottom of your browser when you click on them. Otherwise clicking on those cells won't help, because the Land Store (infuriatingly) only reports coordinates for open cells.
6. Repeat steps 4 and 5 as you make your way closer to your target coordinates, and keep an eye out for landmarks that might help you find your way. When you finally get to your desired location on the grid, center your map on your island and zoom in/out as needed.
7. Once all the reservations are loaded, click around in the vicinity of your island(s) until you find an available space. You may be surprised at how many reservations are surrounding your islands today, and even more surprised that LL is still honoring them even though you'd think most would have expired by now if the reservation program were still active.
   
8. Once you've found an available space, write the coordinates down. I also recommend that you pick 1 or 2 extra available coordinates to include in your order, because it takes so long for these things to process that someone else could claim your preferred space before the Lindens even look at your ticket.

PICKING AN ISLAND NAME
You won't have the Land Store wizard to help you confirm the validity of your island name. If you pick an island name that's too long or is already taken, the Lindens will stop what they're doing and ask you to think up a new name, and this will delay the delivery of your island by 1 business day. Make sure that the island name you pick follows these guidelines:

• No more than 3 words
• A total of more than 3, but less than 20 characters, including the spaces
• Only alphanumeric characters; no punctuation please
• Not already in use
• Do not use the names of real-world cities and towns
• Cannot use "SL," "Second Life," "Linden Lab" or "LL" or other wording that could give the impression of direct association with Linden Lab
• Must be PG

Note that I have noticed a number of brand new islands with names up to 24 characters in length. (The above requirements were quoted to me by Concierge staff.) I have requested clarification from Linden Lab about this, since I had to rename one of my own Openspace orders since the original name was 21 characters.

SUBMITTING A TICKET
1. Go to secondlife.com/support and click 'Submit a Ticket.'
2. Once you're signed in to the support site, fill out your ticket with the following details:
3. SUMMARY: I gave mine descriptive names like: "Openspace order for (island name)"
4. TICKET TYPE: Land and Region Issues
5. REGION REQUEST: Openspace Order (this is new)
6. DETAILS: Be very clear and specific here, and be sure to specify all of the following:

• ISLAND NAME.
• ESTATE NAME. This can be one of your existing estates or a unique estate just for that island.
• DESIRED GRID COORDINATES. I recommend either giving them a list of desired coordinates in order of preference, or giving them explicit instructions about what to do in case the coordinates you requested are taken by the time they get to your order. If you don't do this, they will stop and ask you where to put the island, delaying your order by one day.
• DEFAULT TERRAIN TYPE (optional). You can request one of the default island shapes as specified in the Knowledge Base article, 'Default Private Region RAW Files.' If you don't specify an island type, your Openspace will be empty ocean with a flat seafloor. One of my new Openspaces was delivered as empty ocean, despite my request for an island shape. No biggie, as all the RAWs are available for download anyway.

WAITING
It's been taking around 10-11 business days (up to 15 real days) to process island orders lately, assuming you don't make any mistakes in your order ticket. Resist the temptation to submit more tickets inquiring about status, because the time a Linden spends handling those tickets is time they could have spent setting up your islands.

Ignore the ticket status field in your support queue. Lately, peoples' tickets have been showing up as "New" until the day the island is delivered. Also, you won't be charged until the island is delivered either, so don't consider your USD balance an indication of progress either.

I also think it's wise that you keep an eye on your USD balance. I pay for new islands out of my in-world earnings, so I like to make sure that I've got enough USD there to cover both the island orders and my tier for all my existing islands. If your USD funds get drained away on existing tier while you're waiting for the order to be filled, the Lindens will have to submit a manual charge for the remaining balance of the island order fee, and you really don't want your credit card company to pick that day to deny your charge from this shady Linden Lab outfit. I have friends who have been long-standing LL customers for months/years and their credit card companies just arbitrarily decided to deny a SL-related charge out-of-the-blue. This is just one more headache you should try to avoid.

And remember, like all islands, the tier you pay on your Openspace will be monthly, on the date specified in your "Final Resolution" email that you get when your island is delivered.

The Reservation System: Then and Now

In September of last year, Linden Lab discontinued the ability for residents to order island "reservations." Until that time, it was possible for people who planned to buy an island in the future but weren't ready to do it right away to reserve a spot on the grid for 90 days for a (usually) low fee. The reservation program was at times controversial, because some residents used it for extortion, intentionally bidding on reservations that surrounded existing estates, thereby blocking the estate's expansion until the estate owner paid the reservation holder to sell the reservation. Many of us assumed that when the reservation program ended, all those thousands of reservations currently cluttering up the grid would finally expire, alleviating the expansion headaches of established estate owners.

Unfortunately, six months after the reservation program ended (and three months after all those existing reservations should have expired), this is what you see when you look in the Land Store today (hint: yellow = reserved):

Considering that the Land Store map is grossly out-of-date (it only shows three of my 12 islands, and one of them is in its old location), some of us assumed that maybe all that yellow was just vestiges of long-expired reservations- but we were wrong. Residents are still being extorted by reservation holders, and new sim orders are still being denied due to existing reservations.

It's important to note that a single reserved spot on the grid effectively blocks expansion into any of the cells immediately surrounding it, both adjacent and diagonal, so all those thousands of yellow cells on the grid are actually preventing expansion into many more thousands of cells than it would appear just by glancing on the map.


So what's going on?
Well, despite the fact that all mention of reservations has been wiped from the Second Life Knowledge Base, the reservations program is still alive and well (and making Linden Lab a lot of money). I spoke with someone on the Concierge team today and learned that some of the reservations that show up on the map are indeed expired, and will not be honored if an estate owner wishes to expand in their direction. However, the majority of reservations still registered in the Land Store are actively being maintained by paying residents. You see, once you have a reservation, it's yours as long as you keep renewing your reservation fee every three months. The existing (valid) reservations will only expire once the holder decides to let the "subscription" lapse.

What can estate owners do about it?
First off, if you are an estate owner and someone who owns a reservation near you offers to sell the reservation to you, don't feel compelled to take the offer unless you consider it reasonable. If they're offering the reservation at extortion-level prices, you should Abuse Report the individual and include any IMs or other correspondence with the person in your report. It's one thing to decide you no longer want to keep the reservation and offer to give it up, but another to use it to intentionally extract cash out of established residents.

If you wish to expand and there are reservation slots or built islands that might block your way (remember, reservations block diagonals now, too), contact Concierge or add a note to your support ticket about the reservation in question and ask them to confirm whether it's still valid. They will allow you to expand if the reservation holder's no longer paying for it.

If you determine that all the reservations surrounding you are, in fact, active and valid, you have the option of moving your entire estate- and lucky for you, if your estate is surrounded in such a way that expansion is impossible, Linden Lab will waive the $150 USD per-island move fee and relocate your entire estate somewhere that you'll have more breathing room for free. It's not documented in the Knowledge Base, but it's true, and has been done several times already. The $150 fee is not so much a profit center as it is a disincentive to moving islands around arbitrarily. They want to limit the amount of busywork they have to do on island moves, so they charge a fee to ensure you only move your islands when you really need to. It would be silly for them to charge $150 per island to a resident with 10 islands (who's paying Linden Lab as much as $35,400 a year on island fees), because if that resident simply decided "well, I don't want to pay $1,500 to move, so I guess I just won't buy any more islands," that would hurt Linden Lab in the long run.

So, next time you're in the Land Store and groaning over how hard it is to find anyplace to plant an island, know that you're not completely out of options.