After Ruud Lathrop, Thomas Conover, Seronis Zagato and others tried to bring attention to the grid performance problems on Monday (Zagato, notably was reportedly threatened with a banning by a Linden Lab liaison for her efforts to inform affected residents), Linden Lab have found the issue and are today progressively restarting the grid with updated software that they believe will fix the issue.

The restart should be complete around 1-2 PM SLT (US Pacific). This restart is running North to South, so if you get a warning that the simulator you are in is about to shut down, you can teleport several sims northwards to escape the restart wave.

[Update: 1pm SLT - The rolling restart is now complete]

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.