Metrics Glossary

This explains the Business Definitions of the metrics that are published in the Monthly Metrics Reports and on our Economy page, as well as the Service Metrics.

Active Users

An Active User is defined as a Resident who has logged into the system for longer than 1 Hour for the reported time period. Active users could include Alternate accounts, if those accounts are being used for longer than 1 hour.

Concurrent Residents

Concurrent Residents are determined based on sampling the Presence information (a Backbone service) to determine the total number of currently logged-on users for the system. Concurrency for reporting history and the public data feeds is typically sampled every 10 Minutes.

FPS

Frames Per Second is a standard measure of responsiveness of 3-d virtual online systems. A lower FPS experience is "laggy" and doesn't respond to controls in a timely fashion, and higher FPS results in a smoother experience, up to the human eye maximum resolution of 60 FPS.

Gender

Resident-reported at signup of account, referring to the Gender of the customer controlling the avatar.

L$ Supply

A Monthly snapshot of the overall state of the Linden Economy. Second Life has its own unit-of-trade, the Linden Dollar. Residents use their Linden Dollars to pay for goods and services provided by other Residents.

Linden Resident Balance

The total Balance of Lindens owned by residents is recorded at the Beginning and End of every reporting period.

Sinks to LL

Several types of payments of L$ are economic 'Sinks' that move L$ back to Linden Lab - including Classified Advertising fees, Content Uploading Fees, Group Creation Fees, Land Use payments and Premium Account fees.

Land Size

Land Size is the total monthly summary of square Meters of land available on Simulators on the Production Adult Second Life Grid, including both Mainland (Linden-owned) and Estate (private island-owned) simulators.

Lindex Transactions

The LindeX is a Linden Dollar exchange provided by Linden Lab, offering residents of Second Life the ability to either buy or sell Linden Dollars. Charges are for purchasing Linden Dollars and are placed on the same form of payment you have setup in your account settings for your Second Life account.

Logged In Users

A Logged in User is a user who has connected to the Second Life grid using the client during the reported time period. Currently both User Counts and Hours Spent Inworld are reported for Logged In Users, and broken down by Gender. Logged-in figures include both "Starting"/"Browsing" users as well as Active Users.

Premium Accounts

The count of all accounts paying for Premium access, whether Monthly, Quarterly, Annual, or Lifetime Premium accounts. Premium residents receive a Stipend and are not "Basic" accounts, and are provided a higher level of support service.

Region FPS

Server performance can vary anywhere below 45 Frames Per Second, depending on number of avatars using the sim, number of active scripts, use of physics on the sim, and several other factors. Extremely busy sims that are exceeding the number of avatars that can comfortably use it at a single time, or have excessive Scripts or Physics running will see their server FPS decreasing. Any number between 35 and 45 is pretty much maximal server performance, and any number below 20 is a simulator running slowly and most of the users on that Region will experience strong lag.

Registration Count

A Registered User (a.k.a. "A Resident") is a user who has created an account via the Secondlife.com account registration page or a 3rd party Registration API website, and that account provides the user with the license to log onto the Second Life grid and to use the services on the Secondlife.com website system. Total Resident count includes Alts (Alternate Accounts) and users who set up a resident account but have not yet continued to log onto the Second Life grid, for reasons including "Insufficient Video Card", "No Broadband", and "Cannot download client program onto this (work) machine".

Resident Count

See Registration Count.

Total Hours

Total Hours is the cumulative summary of all time spent inworld by all Users who logged into the system. This number is more inclusive than the Total Hours spent by Active Users.

Unique Residents

Unique is the count of residents that excludes Alts (Alternate Accounts). This includes registration IP, address information and MAC address. The calculation also includes individuals that have not logged in, on the "Population" tab of the published monthly reports.

Viewer Crashes

The Percentage of Second Life Viewer "sessions that ended abnormally" is the percentage of sessions that did not end with an explicit user logout, or "Total Session Crashes". The Percentage of users that were kicked off a Region is the summary of clients disconnected which can occur because the Region went down due to rolling restarts, planned or unplanned grid outage, or sometimes server crashes as well as communication problems between your client and the server. Users experience these with the “you have been disconnected from the simulator” error message. "Viewer Crashes" is the remainder of session crashes that did not originate at the Region and are due to Second Life Viewer crashes.

Viewer FPS

Viewer Frames Per Second is the end-user's experience of responsiveness of the system. Lower FPS systems appear "Laggy" to the end users as they control their avatar and the user does not see a reaction very quickly, or in very low FPS situations the actions take place so quickly the client cannot control details of movement. Viewer FPS is primarily throttled by the client machine hardware and driver configuration.

Median Viewer FPS

This is the overall average client FPS for all sessions logging into Second Life during the reported time period. This value is available as monthly averages in the charts, and daily averages in the data feeds.

Percentile Viewer FPS

Linden Lab divides the measures of average FPS per session into statistical Percentiles for reporting. From the lowest value reported to the highest, we divide the data into 4 Quartiles and report on the 25th Percentile, the Median Value, and the 7th Percentile, which provides good statistical averages while avoiding outlier data.