Only 8,300 people logged in right now and the asset server is almost worthless.

Only 8,300 people. Think about that. If recent exposure on CBS, MTV and other venues really does ignite a population explosion in Second Life, I predict that it would be the end of Second Life.


This photo was taken after waiting for 75 seconds at this one location for the textures of my office and surrounding plots to load. There were 6 other people in on the private sim I was on.

So there were SEVEN people in my sim. SEVEN. And AFTER MORE THAN A MINUTE more than 75% of the textures around me hadn't loaded, AT ALL!

I think its time for Linden Labs to MOVE AWAY FROM MySQL. It's time for them to stop pretending to be a big company with lots of cash and start being one. Though I'm basically out of the IT field now, I spent the last 15 years in it, up to 2005. I can't think of any major company I ever dealt with that would even think of use MySQL as the lifeblood & backbone of their ONLY product. Their ONLY mission-critical, "let's launch this thing worldwide" product.

DUH.

MySQL was never designed to handle the load that is currently being put on it by the mere 8,300 people logged in at the time of this writing.

What if some student body on a college campus somewhere decided to have "Second Life Night" and 10,000 more people all piled on at once?

What would happen if Dateline decided to run a primetime special on Second Life and ageplay?

The servers would die. DIE I tell you, DIE.

Linden Labs needs to STOP ALL DEVELOPMENT, even most of the bug fixes.

They need to put every programmer on the database and the migration of all data stored in MySQL tables to a more robus, commercial, scalable and secure solution.

If they don't they are proving themselves to be very short-sighted and obtuse.

I love SL; loved it since I came here over two years ago from SWG. I've seen that logged-in number slowly climb to where it is today, and the higher it gets, the worse its getting.

Save Our Second Life!
SOSL

Eh. That'd take way to long. Not gonna happen.

Why do you think some of us are wasting our time here in the forums instead of being in Second Life?

That picture looks like what I see all too often.

LL says it's a problem in the pipeline. A pipeline is a sort of tube, right?

I think SL is dying as we speak.

We won't be able to create an object at 10,000 concurrent users.

Did you know MySQL is in bed with SCO!

OH THE HUMANITY!

at one point in time a linden stated that they didnt use MYSQL for the asset servers, they were using a home brew house brand, which scares me even more

if your asking why, the asset server has always had massive amounts of trouble

and the time i happen to be thinking of was right before they did "lets see if we can cram 5000 ppl online @ once" test's

DUH it ran like crap with 1900 ppl on the grid lets market and get that number to 10k

taps foot with an evil glare ...

Ah, I'm guessing that would be why you're suggesting solving speed issues by moving to a slower database. MySQL happens to be faster than offerings from the likes of Oracle or Informix.

Now, it used to be you had to look elsewhere for things like stored procedures or transaction support, but these days MySQL has that kind of stuff too. Which is why it's depended upon these days by thousands of companies and organizations like Yahoo, Google, Suzuki, NASA, AT&T, Motorola, Nokia, etc. If you don't think MySQL is one of the best Enterprise databases out there, it's because your knowledge in the field appears to be dated.

Gaius, I closed my computer shop 5 months ago; my knowledge of the IT industry is hardly "dated," but you would have known that if you had read my entire post before jumping to a conclusion and deciding to be a smartass.

Wikia. Wikipedia. Google. Need I continue?

Honestly, the bottleneck is less the underlying software, more the underlying concepts of how to use it. A centralized system for an open architecture will inevitably fail.

I knew Google used MySQL -- I am also aware that they are responsible for a lot of the changes in the most recent MySQL version.

Which goes back to my assertion that Linden Labs should stop pretending to be a big company with a lot of cash, and start being one.

If the problems don't come from MySQL, and they may very well not, the problems still exist. Period. We can tit-for-tat and bitch and moan at each other about what's causing them, but the fact is, they are real, they are being experienced by a lot of users, and unless addressed NOW, they will get worse.

Each server should be the asset server for all content contained within its virtual borders. What is it, 4 sims per server?

Inventory servers should be split up alphabetically by Avatar last name or something to spread the load.

Agreed.

I agree, but you still have to have one bajeebus asset server/cluster to handle individual inventories.
Also, culling the Trash a bit faster would probably help some. I for one rarley use it.

Do you think tools to help users manage their inventory better woul dbe useful. My hard drive looks nothing like my inventory in SL. My inventory is freaking insane from my point of view.

Ah, if it were more like my computer where open a file edit it and save it (Save) and I only make a copy because I asked to do so (Save As).

Everyone agrees with me, right? It's totally obvious, isn't it? Is this a "duh" statement, or am I missing something elementary?

True. Now let's just cross our fingers and hope THESE servers hold.

Seriously though, my log in time this week has gone to very little. I was on for about 20 mins today.. decided between the asset server not loading things and lag bouncing me all over I was done for the afternoon. I will try again in a min to see if it is improved, but it is at the point where I am playing Halo PC online again. *looks for my guild wars CD*

Effective Implimentation is important.

Years ago I remember Slashdot had tons of issues with MySQL but at the end of the day were able to stick with it. I don't know if they are still running it but I remember it took significant tweaking to make it perform up to snuff. Back then they always complained that it didn't support X or Y feature but it wasn't enough to force them to switch off of it and eventualy they figured out that by tweaking the web servers and the MySQL database settings they could pull it off.

Thank you, Kelly. That is the first time I've heard that the asset server actually works like a webserver.

I sooo look forward to any improvements to asset load, et cetera...

If that means what I think it does then I will love you forever.

No, believe it when I say there are those of us that appreciate knowing that Lindens are listening. Thank you for telling us what is going on to fix it.

really, step in more

its awefully cold in the void where us residents live, you know right between phils dream and developer (non existant) communications

This is good to hear.. So where did the MySQL thing come from?
I always cringed when I though the asset servers ran MySQL.
Too bad there's not very much info about it..
I wonder if there software uses memory as cache, topology, etc
(I know I'm a nerd.)

It prolly comes from a post/townhall/discussion a long long while back when open source/shareware/freeware was being hotly discussed. One of the techie Lindens gave an example list of the technologies they use in the various servers. They were trying to show that they use a mix of open source and "cheaply available but easily modifyable" solutions rather than rely on "big old expensive dinosaur databases". I guess it went down in history as an urban myth that everything ran on MySql.