Ever since my SL "birth" in mid-August, I have watched with great interest the ongoing dilemma of sim performance in Lusk. Lusk, just to remind you where it is, happens to be directly east of the Ahern welcome area, and thus is one of the first places a new user might happen to wander.
It's always puzzled me why Lusk, a sim in such a prime location, with a themed suburban build in its western half and a cool user-made ewok-style forest build in the eastern half, is such a quiet sim. Really, it puzzles me while all the sims in the general vicinity of the welcome area tend to be deserted. There's "Rizal|Sports" in which, for the record, I have never actually witnessed anyone playing sports. There's the elaborate western city sims, which I usually have all to myself whenever I visit. There's the mile-high cyberpunk city of Gibson, where technology has apparently advanced to the point where player characters are obsolete. I could go on. You don't get to a real hub of activity until you look at Da Boom, and I think we all know why that is.
Michi Lumin, one of the founders of that cool ewok build (Luskwood), helped explain some of this for me. She says Luskwood used to be a happenin' place, even a top pick. As Wesley Willis might say, if he were still with us: People flocked to Luskwood to get down to the rock music. Unfortunately Lusk, at the time, was hosted on sim8.agni.lindenlab.com - one of the earliest and slowest sim servers. Too many people on one of those old boxes and you'd have serious lag problems. After a while, Luskwood began to get an unfair reputation for lag, solely because of the unrelated fact that the sim happened to be running on an older server.
Again, I have to wonder why some of the most primely-located land in Second Life was relegated to garbage hardware in the first place, but that's tangential.
As Michi continued to explain to me, 1.3.0 saw the beginning of the "sim lotto" phenomenon. Whenever a sim is forced to reboot, a server is randomly selected from the pool of available servers. This would be an ideal setup if all servers were uniform, but as has been pointed out in the past, they are not. Through the sim lotto system, Lusk happened to land on some middle and newer servers, but by that time, it was too late. The "Lusk = Lag" reputation had already been cemented in place.
What's curious to note is that for a long time, Linden Lab refused to acknowledge that there was any significant difference in performance between newer and older sim servers. Even after eltee Statostky, Chromal Brodsky and others documented this phenomenon (and I also witnessed it firsthand), there was an Orwellian air of "your sims aren't slower" or "changes in content are causing it".
Finally, after months of intense lobbying from Luskwood's founders - eventually nothing more than for Linden Lab to simply tell the truth about sim performance - it came out in the recent Town Hall. Cory admitted that the older hardware was slow enough to make a significant difference. He also outlined a new plan for sim allocation that made perfect sense: slower servers should be used for void sims and undeveloped frontier sims only.
All seemed well, until I read Robin's latest sim performance announcement.
Our current thinking is that we are going to map simulators to classes of CPU's so that you never get a machine slower than the original machine deployed when the land was first put online. What this means is that the older sims will indeed have servers with a slower CPU. These servers will be replaced by new machines when they reach the end of their useful life, although we don't know yet what the schedule will be.
If I'm reading this correctly... and I don't think that there is much room for interpretation in Robin's announcement... it seems Linden Lab is planning on a return to the pre-1.3 system, where newer or older servers are allocated to sims depending on the arbitrary metric of "when the land was first put online".
Linden Lab's consideration of any change at all to the "sim lotto" system is most likely the result of Luskwood's activism. But I fail to see the motive behind Robin's sudden and reactionary response.
At best, this is raw negligence towards the needs of a group of players who are some of your best customers. They own an entire sim in total and have made an elaborate, natural-looking and fun build, right in the back yard of the welcome area.
At worst, if I were paranoid, I might think that Robin's response is a punishment of sorts. That Lusk is slated to return to the outdated hardware as some sort of petty payback for all the complaining that Luskwood's founders were forced to do.
Personally, I don't know what to think, except to say that I am only further appalled by these recent developments in what has always, to me, seemed like one of SL's most pointless debacles. Since my SL "birth" in August, the continued lack of support, and the treatment from Linden Lab's staff that I've seen dealt to the founders of Luskwood, has effectively pushed me away from any significant land commitment in Second Life. It's become increasingly clear to me that, with Linden Lab's attitudes the way they are, SL is only a rewarding experience if you commit as absolutely little as possible to it.
If any Linden Lab employees have even read this far (I'm shocked, thank you), I urge you to use some common sense when implementing the replacement for the sim lotto system. Cory had a fine idea in only using old hardware for void and frontier sims. 2.26GHz servers with lower memory performance are not enough to handle a live, well-developed sim in 1.5. This is a solvable problem. Why not solve it instead of politicking about it? Your reputation depends on this.
