Well, for the past several days, Second Life has been mostly down for people like me. Can’t get logged into the world, and there was a big ol’ explanation telling us why.
Part of it is growing pains, and part of it is inefficient scripts caused in part by a lack of a complete XML-RPC implementation in-world, making it that much harder for objects to talk to each other.
Here, let me quote the Linden Lab CEO:
While we are trying to figure out the specific cause of the problems, the next patch (1.6.5) has some changes that MAY provide some temporary help. The big change is an improvement in the efficiency of the way we check email for scripts. There are currently thousands of scripted objects in SL which are checking for email a total of several hundred times per second. This was something that we didn’t anticipate - content creators in SL are way overloading the system with these email checks, so we need to redesign for a better approach. Hopefully this will drop overall database login load, because profiling suggests that this call is where the database spends most of it’s time.
So, does that mean I’ll finally see them add a complete XML-RPC implementation in? 
Thusly, during our SL downtime, I got in some time on PSO:BB during the open beta (stress test, mind you).
Things have changed a fair bit since my last trip down to Ragol. You actually have to do government missions in multiplayer mode to unlock the next portion of the game.
Ah, well. Enough on games for now, at least. 
Back to work.
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