[UPDATE 25 April 08, 3:40 pm Pacific]

Our payment processor has fixed and tested the process.  All card operations (including updates) are now running within normal time frames.

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Due to an issue with our payment processor, we are unable to update your credit card information at this time. Attempting to delete and update your credit card will be indefinitely delayed. You may enter card data but it will not be active in our system for potentially several more hours .

If you have valid credit card or payment information, you can continue to USE it with no problems- this only affects updating card information, or initial card data entry.

Updating Paypal payment information is completely unaffected.

We are working with our payment processor, and credit card updating will work as normal as soon as their issues are resolved.

http://get.secondlife.com will now immediately fetch you the latest release version of Second Life, no questions asked.

We figure out your operating system based on transparent information that is included in every HTTP web request made by a common browser. However, as with all “smart, convenient” software, it can guess wrong. If you need a specific operating system version:

http://get.secondlife.com/win

http://get.secondlife.com/mac

http://get.secondlife.com/linux

For those of you that may be wondering, this is actually an old side project of mine that I never got around to until recently. It did not take up anyone else’s time but mine, and all bugs are my fault, so you should blame me. I hope you find it useful when you’re on a new computer that doesn’t have SL installed. (say, at a convention?)

The land store upgrade is complete. Here are the changes:

• I expanded the reservable area by 300 units west, 100 units north.
• The land store now displays the X, Y coordinate more for many “unavailable” messages.
• In order for you to reserve a space, all EIGHT spaces around it must be open; that is, they must not be reserved or built-upon already. Previously, this was just the four cardinal directions.

Again, please note that we are in the process of redesigning the entire “Land Store” concept. I understand that the current incarnation is somewhat difficult to use, and the Lindens involved with the Land Store have been very vocal about resident feedback with various frustrations.

Comments are welcome, but please try to keep it useful or constructive! Thanks a lot for your patience today.

The Land Store will be coming down next Monday in order for us to attempt an upgrade. Several improvements are planned:

• We will expand the reservable area by 100 units on the west, north.
• We will now display the X, Y coordinate where you are clicking, for convenience.
• Reservations will now start checking for diagonal corners.

In addition, please note that we are now in the process of redesigning the entire “Land Store” concept. I understand that the current incarnation is somewhat difficult to use, and the Lindens involved with the Land Store have been very vocal about resident feedback.

We expect to have the Land Store down for no more than 3 hours, starting at 11am Pacific.

edit: Sorry folks! I corrected my third point because it was saying the exact opposite what I meant.  Currently, you can pick a space if the four spaces directly next to it are empty/yours.  After the upgrade, you can pick a space only if all eight spaces next to it (including the diagonal corners) are empty/yours.

Also, another correction is the expansion space: we will be expanding 100 units north, and 300 units west.  We will not be expanding south.

Thank you!

When I started doing operational work, we only had 2 webservers, and that was more than plenty.  They had been fairly well configured, performance-wise; most of the time, they just sat idle, actually.

The media attention, the growth, and new web development features since then have made us throw up a third, and then quickly another two, and so on.  Meanwhile, webserver performance/reliability went from a non-issue, to occasional mention, to minor annoyance, into regular headaches.

We’ve taken several angles of attack to try to improve this.  The latest in our arsenal is the installation of a load balancer.

(Many of you will already know what it does, but for the ones who don’t, it essentially sits in front of our webservers, taking your web page requests and contracting them out to the webservers indirectly.  While this indirectness may seem like it makes things slower, this proxy actually solves many performance headaches.)

To facilitate the load balancer, we had to make one visible change- HTTPS requests that used to go to https://secondlife.com now will go to something like “https://secure-web#.secondlife.com” where # is a number.  Rest assured that this is an intentional change, and not a sign that “we got hax’d!”.

There may be a few SSL certificate issues remaining with some of our web applications. Please do let me know, and we’ll get on any that show up.

Hopefully, though, the only other change you’ll see is that during what used to be heavy load times, the website experience is still fairly fast.

I could go on about the technical aspects, but I’m sure I sound pretty boring at this point, so I will just say, thank you to the ones who have been patient with us.  Thank you for even coming to the website in the first place, so that we would even have this “problem of success.”  Thanks!

I’ve already covered this earlier with Blue’s post, but it’s worth repeating again:

If you use the in-world Buy L$ feature to purchase Linden Dollars, your L$ balance in-world will not automatically update.

Any of these conditions will fix the display and update your balance:

* Make a transaction of any other type.

* Relog.

The following is a transcript of the Technical Town Hall with Cory Linden, held on December 20, 2006 @ 2:30 PM PST.

Cory Linden: Good afternoon and thank you all for showing up. It has been far too long since I’ve done a town hall meeting so this should be fun. With Jeska’s help, I’ve pulled questions from the blog thread and I’d like to start by answering a bunch of those in a data-dump kind of way, then we can spend the bulk of the hour trying to hit as many additional questions as possible. Let’s see if we can’t set a new record for number of lines of chat text in one hour.

OK, here we go . . .

(more…)

Second Life now has more than Two Million Residents, as evidenced by the “Total Residents” statistic on the front page. You know what they say, “the first million is the hardest.” We hit 1 million somewhere in Oct, and just two months later, here we are looking at 2. The pace sure is picking up!

Congratulations to the Second Life community and also the rest of the Lab too!

Previously, we’ve been updating that number once a day, but in the interest of 2 million, I took a look at the way the statistic was being generated, and found a couple optimizations. As a result, starting tomorrow that number should start updating more frequently- I’m initially aiming for an hour, but we’ll see if something unexpected comes up.

I’ve also noticed that some of you have been curious about how we measure that number, so I’m going to endeavor to clear some questions up:

The number is measured by querying against our database for the number of accounts in “normal” status.

This does not include:

• Folks who start the signup process but never complete it.
• Folks who are currently being suspended/held for CSR purposes.
• Folks who cancel or have been cancelled for various reasons.

This does include Linden and testing accounts made by the Lab, but the number is statistically insignificant- .05 of a percent and shrinking rapidly, as we do not regularly create accounts.

Anyone want to take a guess at when we’ll hit 3?

Sometimes the most trivial part of your Second Life experience, when magnified ten thousand times, becomes not such a trivial thing after all.

Case in point: The client you download may just seem like a 5-minute nuisance to you. Magnified ten thousand times, it becomes a severe issue for our webservers on days when we release a new version- tens of thousands of people all rushing to download them at the same time. An average of 30 MB per download, multiplied by however many folks who want to login to this Second Life thing, comes out to a lot of bits.

In the not-too-distant past, we had a few thousands of residents. Our webservers did not work up a sweat serving those files on release days. Then we had a few tens of thousands, and our webservers saw some load, but it in no way caused any inconveniences for any of us. But we have been growing rapidly…

(more…)

You might notice a few things appear to be missing on the right sidebar- most notably the list of authors and the event calendar. We are investigating our options, but the blog is otherwise at its new host.

Yes, we have moved over to WordPress.com’s VIP program, which is basically “we’ll run your blog for you and do some custom work, in return, you pay us some money.” To me, that’s exactly what we’re looking for, as our business does not precisely revolve around making the blog stay up, but it sure as hell depends on it.

So, just for the record, so far the WordPress.com guys have been rockin’- I’ve talked to Matt himself, and the WP folks that I do get to talk to are both competent and fast- which is more than I can say for myself sometimes.

Bear with us if you notice anything else out of the ordinary, and please do feel to make comments again.