Linden Lab releases November service quality metrics

Every month, Linden Lab releases charts and raw data about Second Life simulator performance, viewer crashes and average view frame-rates. The November figures came out today. A lot of the numbers are pretty dry, so we'll break down the results for you.

During the month of November, a median 2.5% of simulators were significantly overloaded or otherwise performing poorly, operating at least 33% below performance targets. That's an estimated 38 simulators at any given moment, based on a notional 1,500 simulators on the grid.

Average viewer framerates improved, partly we think as a result of new rendering code in first-look and release-candidate viewers, and partly because of an inevitable improvement over time in hardware (my own hardware was upgraded in the last few weeks, and easily runs windlight at maximum settings at well over 50fps and without, I may note, any crashes at all).

Overall client crash rates seem to be down most of one percent, showing a slight, but noticeable overall improvement. Since 'crash' is an overly broad term, these can also be caused by power outages, hardware failures, system overwork, overclocking or intermediate disconnects. Although there is some work on Linden Lab's part to weed out third-party causes from their data, inevitably some of those causes will wind up mixed in with first-party data.