Short notice upgrade for Second Life

Offering only a little over 17 hours notice for a software update, Linden Lab has announced that Second Life central servers will be updated to fix two rather long-standing bugs.

While we are told that the upgrade to fix these appears to be not include any interruption, there are two items worthy of note.

The first is that every central-servers update that has gone ahead thus far has severely impacted performance on the grid and often also logins. We're not saying that this is what will happen tomorrow – just observing that that is what has happened on every previous occasion that we are aware of. That update will be taking place between 10:30AM and Noon SLT (US Pacific) tomorrow, Tuesday 29 January.

The second item is that it will be followed by a five hour rolling restart, commencing at approximately 2:30PM SLT. Unless the rolling restart mechanism has been significantly improved, we expect that it will take longer than the anticipated five hours, and probably run closer to seven before the last systems are sorted out – again, based purely on past performance.

The two bugs being fixed are:

• SVC-930: Prims set for sale – prices are incorrectly set when multiple prims taken to inventory and rezzed (outstanding since 8 November 2007)
• SVC-1039: llResetScript() from a state without a touch_start handler does not re-enable touch in default state (outstanding since 18 July 2007)

Update: 6:20PM SLT – Work is still ongoing, and has gone about as well as we'd predicted, unfortunately. far worse than expected. Problems with the initial update mean that the rolling restart didn't even get off the ground today.