On Thursday 14th May Linden Lab announced that they are limiting the availability of new Second Life regions until early Autumn due to the ongoing public health crisis and the work to move Second Life to the cloud. The lab have noticed an “unprecedented surge in demand” for new Second Life regions lately.
On Friday 15th May Patch Linden said this in the forums about efforts into enforcement and cleanup. Apparently the lab have a “healthy supply of mainland” including entire mainland regions.
We have put a lot of thought in to the various things we can do with the mainland. That included consideration for moving parcel owners around. We decided that right now, with the pandemic and people turning to Second Life for some stability and comfort in their lives, that the upset of having to go through a some sort of mass-move effort was too negative of an experience. Instead, we’re going to put our efforts into enforcement, clean-up, and loosen restrictions on mainland purchase qualifications where we can. We do have a healthy supply of mainland, up to and including some entire full mainland regions that we can make available via auction.
At the present, we’re not going to be looking at any sort of down-sizing, rebuilding or re-configuring of the old Linden Homes regions. Work has not stopped on the new Linden Homes either. We have a good bit of runway to continue the build and release of the already present themes and regions to carry us through without adding any new regions. We will also continue to work on the upcoming themes at full speed ahead to get them ready for future release.
– Patch Linden – (16th May)
The lab says now the current Second Life server systems cannot accommodate unlimited growth without impacting on performance and stability. Region inventory will be “extremely limited” and may not be “readily available until early fall”.
Due to the ongoing public health crisis, we’ve experienced an unprecedented surge in demand for new Second Life regions. While we are thrilled by the heightened interest, the increased demand has consumed our available inventory of full regions and homesteads (there are still many parcels available on existing regions, both on the mainland and from private estates).
We are committed to maintaining (and improving) the stability and performance of Second Life. So while we are very gratified that we can be of help to people in these trying times, unfortunately, our current server systems cannot accommodate unlimited growth without adversely impacting that stability and performance. This means that region inventory in Second Life will be extremely limited and may not be readily available until early fall.
As many know already Second Life is in the process of migrating from the existing dedicated servers to a cloud hosting service. When the process has been completed then the region capacity will be hopefully unlimited again.
Second Life is in the process of migrating from our existing dedicated servers to a cloud hosting service. That migration has already moved a number of the most important services and databases, but we are not quite ready to host simulators in the cloud. We have a crack team working on that and are making lots of progress, but there are significant changes needed to make sure that we can provide the performance, stability, and security required. When that process is complete we will have a nearly unlimited region capacity, but until then we are constrained by the size of our existing server fleet.
While our migration project has been underway for some time, even our most optimistic business projections did not anticipate a surge of the magnitude we have seen in recent weeks for additional regions. While we planned for growth driven by improvements to Second Life and other factors, we didn’t expect demand to be created by a global pandemic.
As a result, we are in the unfortunate position of hitting the maximum capacity of our “old” servers until the “new” cloud servers are fully operational.
Overall it’s good that Second Life is still so popular but I do feel sorry for Linden Lab regarding the timing. It will be great when the cloud project is finally completed later in 2020 if all goes to plan and when the new cloud servers become fully operational.
Daniel Voyager 
Reblogged this on ZZ Bottom misadventures in Virtual Worlds!.
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