CSI brings tide not torrent

Posted Oct 26th 2007 10:00AM by Tateru Nino
Filed under: Accounts, Mixed Reality

Assuming CSI:NY had not aired their program featuring Second Life on Wednesday this week, projected signups for Wednesday and Thursday were expected to total 47,434. Actual signups for Wednesday and Thursday this week exceeded that projection by 74,412 signups, with 122,846 new registrations taking place in that 48 hour period.

The incident was marred, however, by the failure of the webservers for the CSI event, preventing many from registering via the CSI registration portal or downloading the OnRez viewer, both provided by the Electric Sheep Company.

Concurrency for Thursday exceeded normal expectations, and was very nearly a record at peak, but was not extraordinarily high. Of course, many new midweek registrants do not log in the same day or on a weekday, with many opting to wait until the following day to connect to Second Life, or until the weekend. Sunday's figures are going to be the ones to watch.

Is the CSI:NY promotion a hit or a miss? Frankly, it's too early to tell - making predictions at this juncture is no better than a throw of the dice. You might actually be right - but the conclusion isn't based on observed fact.

Tags: concurrency, onrez, signups

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1. Just a note on the webserver issues, we did have to make some optimizations to better handle load. The biggest problem was on the download side for the OnRez Viewer -- a combination of Amazon's EC2 and S3 services was not handling demand properly, slowing things down, and we had to remove EC2 from the equation. Once we were solely using S3 for downloads, things were running smoothly. (at least, this is my understanding)

The other challenge we faced was that Linden Lab's registration portal requires passwords be sent via email after an avatar name is chosen, and due to the large number of registrations, it looks like some got lost in spam filters or potentially blocked by ISPs -- we're trying to investigate. We all need a better solution because a blocked email only leads to confused people who cannot log in.

Thanks, Giff Constable aka Forseti Svarog

Posted at 1:12PM on Oct 26th 2007 by Forseti Svarog

2. I went dot chasing last night into the CS:I islands and saw rank newbs with skin, prim hair, non-ruth shapes, decent clothes and no AO.

Was I seeing experienced SLers re-registering or are these new players being fitted with a ready made av?

All speculation, it was 4am, but I found it strange I didn't see one boy-next-door in the place.

Posted at 4:24PM on Oct 26th 2007 by Jayden B

3. Forseti, the issue about the emails is sadly something that I've encountered often while using RegAPI. It would simply refuse to send the required link for activation to the user by email (although it did, indeed, accept the registration and gave back an "ok"). Sometimes this happens, and remains unsolved for several days — then, unexpectedly, it works again. I do really hope that you managed to get it fixed by Linden Lab as well — indirectly, it helps all of us!

Good job dealing with Amazon's S3 service too :)

Jayden, I also spent a lot of time yesterday at one of the CSI:NY orientation areas, and indeed, newbies are getting much nicer avatars when registering through the site developed by the Sheep :) Nice touch — at least they get some proper skins, primmed hair, and nice flexiskirts for the girls! Bye-bye "guy-next-door" look!

Posted at 5:54PM on Oct 26th 2007 by Gwyneth Llewelyn

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