SL Scalability -- Issues to address.

I forgot to check on the state of zone scalability at the 1 and 2-year marks from the start or end of this discussion on scalability. Pity. The limit was about 40 people at the time, IIRC.

Are there any stats available showing the increase in zone occupancy limits over the last two years? Major event holders will have those figures too, so it doesn't need to come from LL.

Morg.

Well, Islands can be increased to allow up to 100 avatars. I know several that have their limit at max. I was on one of those 3 days ago, along with 70 other avatars. Lag was actually minimal. I rezzed a vendor, set it up without issue. Chatted awhile, and Teleported away. This was a new class 5 Island. Several months back I had the opposite experience. Class 5 island, 93 people there. The lag was unbearable. Stayed about 2 minutes and left.

Excellent datapoint, thanks.

The region scaling situation hasn't changed since May, apparently.

Judging by the hundreds of SL live music events I've attended since then, 70 is the normal cap set on the better sims (but 50 is still common), and the big name performers like Cylindrian and Komuso regularly hit the end stops when concerts are well advertised.

That hasn't been happening recently though, with attendances way down because of IM and TP problems and general SL flakiness. Presumably they'll pick up again once the troubles are over.

Interestingly, client performance is still quite good at 70, using the official Linux alpha client on my fairly old Athlon64 3200+ (2.1GHz) and a cheap nVidia 8500 GT graphics card. With the help of the sprite technology in the Windlight branch, more modern machines should be able to deal with 100+ audiences quite well. And more optimizations are coming.

More in 6 months' time, if I remember.

Morg.

There hasn't been any point in reporting on progress regularly because SL's sim scalability has not been increasing at all.

In fact, it's been decreasing, effectively, because as time passes, people wear more complex clothing and hair, so the maximum number of people that a region can support has been dropping slowly.

Maxed-out concert sims are now a thing of the past. Where we used to hit 70-75 many times a day for the top performers, it's now rare to see more than 50-55 anymore. This is in part because of the disaster that is IM though --- event advertising just isn't getting through.

Subscriber numbers and concurrent online numbers have continued to increase steadily though, so the lack of matching sim scalability means that we're effectively moving backwards as a percentage of population.

This won't change. Zero Linden has said that it's up to 3rd parties to make scalable sims -- LL isn't interested. Come on Opensim.

Morgaine.

The downward trend in region scalability continues, sadly, as a result of users' expectations always rising and hence avatars becoming more demanding with time. It's rare to find mass events holding more than 50 or so avatars per region now, at least in the SL Live Music scene.

Avatars becoming more demanding with time is a normal and justified user expectation of course, since computers also become more powerful with time. However, in this age of multicore the improvement in CPUs isn't so much in instruction or clock speed as in providing multiple parallel cores, which are independent processing units.

Unfortunately, sims run on a single core only (or part of one in the case of water regions that share a core), so a single sim cannot employ multiple cores for scaling up its region power. As far as we know, that's hardwired into LL's sim design.

Until that changes, we can't really expect the situation to improve in any fundamental way.

However, one should assume that LL is making continuous small and unseen incremental improvements in sim efficiency to counter the rise in expectations. The problem with that approach though is that it obeys the law of diminishing returns. That road does not lead to a glorious future of highly scalable sims.

Morg.