Wagner James Au / New World Notes

Photo of Catwa sale mob crush by SL blogger Kirsten Corleone; large version is not worksafe.

The L$1 sale of Catwa avatar heads caused the Marketplace website to crash due to heavy demand, provoking Linden Lab to remove the item from the store, and instead, make it available in-world on several sims… which also overloaded with head-hungry shoppers (see pic at right). All this happened while Linden Lab advertised a search for an engineer who could help craft the virtual world's future – and that irony was not lost on some New World Notes readers:

Crashing Marketplace over a L$1 Mesh head is cause to weep for all of the [SL users] who have taken over Your World, Your Imagination. Not having that mesh head is the first step in having a head of your own. Stop the madness.

— Clara Seller 

I think Clara's arguing as others have, that mesh has made Second Life a consumer-focused world. To be sure, there have always been sim-crashing shopping crazes, but in older times, there would also be massively popular arts and culture events across the virtual world at the same time — but now those are far and few.

The laggy in-world mob crash also shows the limits of the Amazon cloud migration's ability to improve performance (though it definitely has improved) and points to the fundamental problems with legacy code:

SL's viewer code is such a shitshow that Linden Lab is probably having to write a whole new client for SL, that doesn't use at best, a sizable amount of existing viewer code, and at worst, is written from scratch.

Linden Lab has essentially made what amounts to 7-layer spaghetti code that has had layers of code plopped on top of or replacing others over the years. We still use a rendering pipeline that doesn't use multi-core rendering or take more advantage of higher VRAM than 1-2GB outside of certain TPVs who have overridden Linden Lab's hard limit on that VRAM – Which would be fine if we weren't living in 2021 and not 2001, and if Mesh wasn't a factor. The UI is, while I am accustomed to it, is clunky and hard to understand for new users, making onboarding a nightmare. The loading of assets such as textures is a joke, as the viewer fails to prioritize loading assets closest to either the camera or the user's avatar, and even then, it is horrendously slow to load at times and sometimes takes hard refreshing textures on an object to get it to render properly.

This isn't helped by the fact that Linden Lab is quite restrictive on what Officially Approved TPVs can do to mitigate this. While this is reasonable for some circumstances… some viewers, like Firestorm, are known for having gotten more bloated over the years. 

— Nodoka Hanamura 

Much more here. To me the added irony is that none of this had to happen; as I've said before, Linden Lab should create an entirely new mesh-only virtual world that's integrated within the existing viewer as an "SL 2" option — then rebrand the existing Second Life as SL Classic, and promote it to the teens raised on Minecraft and Roblox.