Second Life parcel-traffic scoring to change at the end of the month
Ever notice that the Second Life grid's performance tends to suddenly drop at midnight, Pacific time? That's the hurly-burly of batch processing. Stipend payments, group disbursements and traffic calculations. In fact, some parts of the traffic calculations system is so dense and arcane that processing the previous 24 hours worth of data doesn't always even finish within 24 hours.
Linden Lab have been making noises about simplifying the traffic system for about three years, and there have been a number of under-the-hood tweaks to the algorithms during that time. In fact, the majority of Second Life users believe that the new system that has been announced has actually already been in place since 2006 (partly because the existing system can appear that way, as an edge-case of some overly-simplistic testing methodology).
The new traffic scores will replace the old scores on 1 September, with heavily trafficked parcels expected to see the least difference in resulting scores. The new system simply totals cumulative minutes spent on the parcel, what Linden Lab has previously referred to as the '1:1:1 system': One point is one user for one minute; rather than a system which partially relies on where a user spends the rest of their time during the day.
Mostly, the reaction to the change by users seems to be one of mild bafflement, as the system that is being migrated to is the system that the majority believes has been in effect for a long time.
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