Hello everyone, as lot of you have noticed MD Labs platform (vendors, trackers, security orbs, trinkets, gift givers, etc) had some severe hickup last Saturday, November 5th.

I have been investigating on what happened and I came to the conclusion that there is a combination of causes behind it: the new machine’s power I am testing for the platform, the high traffic generated by lot of events and weekend sales taking place and the utilization of the Online Services website, often to perform some heavy operations like searching for users, creating reports, exporting data. When the weekly maintenance procedure kicked in at 5.00pm SLT (1.00am my time) the added workload pushed the machine above its computing capacity and by around 5.14pm SLT the machine entered in DOS (denial of service), generating a domino effect on the whole platform. This situation lasted until 5.37pm SLT (1:37am my time) when I was able to forcefully stop a few intensive tasks running; but by that time the list of pending operations (transactions to process, visits to store, data to export, etc) queued during the denial of service was so high that the machine was fully overloaded for a few hours more, until around 8pm SLT (4am my time); in this time frame some of the pending operations were successfully executed, while other failed due to reaching timeouts caused by the machine slowness. The situation was back to normality at around 10pm SLT, although the machine had a high usage for several hours more.

I have been monitoring the situation closely all yesterday and I have been taking all the necessary actions to ensure that if the same combination of events will occur again, the platform will not be affected.

I am very well aware that this hiccup created a lot of mess and stress for a lot of you, especially owners using my vendor system: I never forget I have the responsibility of your sales, I know very well that real money is involved and for many of you Second Life is the main source of income. So once again I apologize for what happened: unfortunately it is not easy to correctly size all the parts of the platform to work smoothly in every circumstance while keeping the platform’s cost under control.

To all vendor system users having a subscription active I decided to give two weeks of free subscription, which will be automatically added at the next renewal; whether you will renew your subscription today, tomorrow, next month or later, two weeks of subscription will be added for free. I know it’s not much but it’s to thank you all for your constant support and patience you show me, even when the things don’t go as they should.

I really hope you will appreciate it.