Second Life service quality metrics for January 2008

Linden Lab's statistician, Meta Linden, has posted the service quality metrics for Second Life for January 2008. While there was a larger quantity of planned outages (rolling restarts, capacity upgrades and whatnot) reflected in January's figures, unplanned outages were lower – though significantly the service quality metrics don't seem to include things like partial subsystem outages and service degradation, that are much harder things to track and measure.

The first half of January, notably was one of the worst periods for user experience in some months. You wouldn't know that from looking at these metrics. That's not really what they're designed to measure.

On the whole, viewer crash rates for the official Second Life viewer seem to be slightly up, and crash rates for the release candidate/first look viewers seem to be down.

Median viewer frame rates are up a bit, roughly in the 7-13fps range. If that sounds a bit low, consider that many people tune their graphic options up until their frame rates are just about to dip below what they personally feel is usable.

Simulator performance likewise showed improvement – although so much of that is in the hands of the users, that it is difficult to correlate that with code improvements necessarily, though code improvements must be a factor there.

Overall there still seems to be a lot of room for improvement.