Second Life residents Ruud Lathrop, Thomas Conover and Seronis Zagato, to name just a few, have noted a significant performance decrease in simulators grid-wide. Performance of all scripts appears to have dropped a full 50% across the board, since the rolling restart on Thursday. This appears to be impacting residents in subtle ways, including causing problems with network vendors and security systems, and problems with the scripted orientation systems on Linden Lab's orientation islands.

When Seronis Zagato attempted to alert other Second Life Volunteers to the nature of the problem (as it had a noticeable impact on new resident experiences) she was, she says, dressed-down by a Linden Lab liaison. Ruud Lathrop has created a JIRA issue to alert Linden Lab to the problem, and to accumulate votes for it to be fixed. The issue is SCV-385.

Since the last rolling update, there have been a trickle of complaints about objects vanishing. Specifically, if you didn't have copy permissions on the object, and the object could not be created inworld, it was gone from your inventory.

The fix for this is apparently a minor one, and despite it being a Friday, Linden Lab is rolling out a fix for this in one hour's time, at 10pm SLT (US Pacific). Judging by the last one, it should take 2.5 hours to apply across the grid. With a little luck, nothing else will go horribly wrong in the process.

Tomorrow's update to 1.18.0 has been called off abruptly. Basically, Linden Lab's just not happy with a number of things about it. Let's say that it's got 'issues' and leave it at that. Joshua Linden suggests that those 'issues' will take several weeks to sort out. By several, we'd guess two or three.

Now with 1.18.0 off the table that makes the other bug-fixes more critical. The rolling restart is back on the table, and you can get fixes right now for your crashes-when-I-try-to-edit-something bug. As for the rolling restart, with it so close to 1.18.0, it didn't get the attention it deserved, and probably won't be coming out until Wednesday or Thursday.

The downtime for the support portal is still on, however.

Well, okay, not quite so bad as all that - but there is a reason we get updates on a Wednesday rather than on a Friday - it leaves a couple days to fix things if they go sour. Stuff that gets broken on a Friday even generally stays that way until .. well, usually Tuesday.

The broken function is llGiveInventoryList() which gives someone a bunch of objects in a named inventory folder. Most objects that give you multiple items use this function. The breakage occurs in that (since the rolling update today) the function does not now give you the items in a folder. Scripts go into your scripts folder, notecards to your notecards folder, animations to your animations folder, clothing and body parts to their respective folders, and (worse!) are automatically worn!

This alone promises a poor weekend for Residents who spend their time helping newbies.

Joshua Linden reports that a rolling update has started, installing a server-side patch for each region. This is intended to fix several issues to do with messed up formatting in group notices, and objects that are rezzed on full parcels being sent to the far southwest corner of the sim.

Rolling updates take a while, depending on load, and (at present) usually take over an hour to complete. A five minute warning is given to all avatars in a sim. Sims are restarted left-to-right, top-to-bottom, so if the sim you are in is about to be restarted, head to a more northerly sim, as they will have already been done.