Server Performance Question

If people moved to a faster sim will they get the same amount of land, same +/- m on edit land?
How long is the "life" of a server?

I missed that annoucement. Does this imply a Linden migration of your content from one sim to another to achieve performance improvements? Or, just help in deciding whether or not to sell current plots?

My sim, Palulop, is notoriously slow and laggy. How 'bout just migrating the entire sim to a higher-performance server?

yay yay yay!!! empty sims where people have migrated from!!! camping grounds!!!!!!

Oeh upgrade NAVORA please !!!
I'm going to recode parts of the backpack to make the lag less, but a faster server would be awesome too!!

This won't change anything other than sim performance. Many people have experienced alot of fluctuation when their sim bounced between newer and older hardware. The goal here is to make this performance predictable. If you find that your land is on a sim which you feel is too slow, it's up to you to move somewhere else with a faster server. (Although we'll also offer some sort of upgrade path once we work out the details.) At some point we'll probably indicate the server class in the About box.

At the moment, Navora is running on the fastest sim hardware we own, so it's not going to be getting any faster.

does that upgrade path include making sure that i have good neighbors? I have spent countless hours on my build, terraforming, decorating, and above all, purchasing small plots to make a contiguous plot of 22,500 on the corner of the world in a low traffic sim for privacy and quiet while building? Does this path ensure me another city sim with 2x prims like i have in Barcola (7 plots)? Does the path ensure all of that or am I being forced to swallow a legacy box with my only hope to just move to some noob infested sim surrounded by whatever they feel like learning to build, script, litter etc??? I bought/sold land as neighbors that were undesirable in my opinion moved in. I have moved my home quite a few times, and finally found somewhere I enjoy and now it's "if you ever watn performance you have to move." *Sigh*

I really hope that this is not the case otherwise my RL investments were a waste, on top of all my time i have spent developing an escape from my first life, essentially my draw to SL in it's entirety. From what Philip mentioned in the land forums i didnt realize the attitude shifted to "if you dont like your sim move" from "obsolete servers will eventually be upgraded."

If its up to me to move then that dosent help much. I would have to find land for sale. Yes there is a lot of land for sale but at 5-10 times the cost I paid for mine, not including the +/- 40 land edit I have now.

I thank you for the fast answer Ian but no offence it just dosent seem like much of a deal for the older sims.

Crimson

And with that comment, I can see the end of the tunnel that is my SL experience.... though not the exact date or time.

I really cannot believe that any corporate figure/employee would ever so blatantly state that all people paying equal money for equal services are not entitled to such - and in such a clear and unambiguous fashion.

Sigh.

And people wonder why I am a cynic and a curmudgeon.

When the "Kiddie Grid" is started will they have New/Fast servers or the slow ones?
I think you should take care of the Adult Grid first.

Crimson

I am with Crim on this, I think its rather unfair to single out older sim land owners just because they are on one of the first sims in world.

These sims use more resources as those sims are fully terraformable. There is no "Reverting" back to what it orginal was.

I understand the need to slowly rotate out old stock at the colo but this is going to lead to a few things.

People seeking performance are going to head for new sims but meanwhile the land barrons are going to eat up all the available land to take advantage of the people migrating to get off the sims of poor performance.

This fact alone is disturbing not only on the performance side of the house but on the aspect that a long time set of players that have sat down roots in certain sims and call them home are being penalized for homesteading.

Very unfair arbitration if you ask me. Granted I know the "Idependent" sim owners have a valid complaint that they paid 980 for a set up fee to own that sim but at the same time what makes it fair to users that have continualy paid tier fees on older sims for the past 18 months.

Any responces?

Shadow,

Ian was pretty specific when he said,
>>>"The goal here is to make this performance predictable. If you find that your land is on a sim which you feel is too slow, it's up to you to move somewhere else with a faster server. (Although we'll also offer some sort of upgrade path once we work out the details.) At some point we'll probably indicate the server class in the About box. "
<<<

The goal is not to
1. Make residents happy.
2. To provide equitable service to people paying equal amounts
3. Compensate anyone for inconsistent grid performance

Combining that with an earlier post in a different thread...
The goal is
1. to make performance predictable
2. to shift responsibility for performance dissatisfaction to the residents ----- I refer here to Philip's post in an earlier thread
/130/ca/29461/1.html
post 26...
quote ...we could also allow landowners to optionally pay something extra to get an upgrade or even to pay extra for some super-fast class of machine that isn't widely economical yet. This is something I'd love to hear feedback on... we would be happy to do that as cheaply as possible for folks.....unquote

Okay. So are we all in agreement then to double our tier fees for the next 6 months so they can upgrade the 100 or so Pentium 4's they currently employ within a reasonable timeframe?

Are we going to allow the lindens to put everything on hold to upgrade a couple old machines? We don't need no stinking bug fixes! 400 server fps is KEY! IT IS REQUIRED OR I AM WALKING!@!@#$@#$@#$

Sigh.

LF

Forgive me if i am wrong but in what shop do the software developers and QA personnel who squash bugs and code the application, assist in hardware upgrades??? I am pretty sure that this is something that can be done by two very differing job descriptions, and it's not a one or other kind of decision. Unless of course all my history in IT doesn't apply to LL.

Who the hell said that?
I said that with the stated policy - by both the CEO and a key employee who should know - equal service for all is not the mission of the corporation. That being the case, I can see the end of my being a customer here... tho that could change if the policy changes before my annual fee is used up.

As for demanding something - implied by your caps and punctuation marks - I ain;t demanding a damn thing... only commenting for what it's worth.

The fact that these are not Linden Lab's goals is precisely part of the reason why I've decided not to make any significant land commitments in SL.

See also this thread.

First some clarification - by "upgrade path" I mean a resident-initiated means to transfer an existing sim onto better hardware. So you'd still live in the same place, but the performance of that region would be enhanced. This is what Philip was referring too - obviously we're not sure what form this will take yet. We'd love to hear your suggestions.

Also, of course at some point we'll have to decommision our older hardware. We're already talking about shifting some number of slow machines into development and testing roles, which would necessitate replacing them with new hardware. A currently open question is, when happens when we do that? Do we just shift all the sims down the line a little, or do we move the sims that were on the old hardware to the head of the line, onto the latest hardware? The latter is simpler but could create, among other things, a weird new sort of land speculation.

There are certainly other ways we could do this - there are plenty of potential metrics for sorting sims into performance classes. But the fact remains that some people will always end up in the slower class, making every option "unfair" to somebody. The only thing that would be fair to everyone would be upgrading the entire grid with each technology advance, which would be well outside our means. Or, I suppose we could underclock our new hardware to match the performance of the old stuff, but I hope everyone agrees that inequality is preferable to uniformity at the lowest common denominator.

i'm gonna wait until the schedule is published. our group has worked hard to aquire contiguous land in zoe. so has the other major land owner in the sim. other groups i belong to have worked hard to do the same in slate and natoma. not to mention the people that have worked to make taber what it is. these are all original core sims.

if we must be relegated to older hardware, but the schedule specifies that we get the next round of upgrades, and that's in a couple of months, i can live with that. zoe is sim95 now and functioning at an average 400fps. taber is sim479 and doing about the same. but taber has always had a problem. it does well to show 40fps on one of the older machines. there's no way to fix that though. they've looked and looked and looked and looked...

anyway i agree that the goal is not to provide equal service for equal pay. but ll decided a long time ago to not focus on hosting content in an open, browsable platform like a web space provider. the focus is building a virtual world community and economy. telehubs are all about making some land more valuable than other. this will essentially do the same thus meeting the corporate goal. no sense complaining about it unless we want to write a letter to the investors and try to convince them that they'd make more money promoting the whole thing as the next development in w3b browsing.

oh and i totally disagree that private estate owners deserve special pampering for paying $980 up front. mainland sim purchasers pay nearly twice that, plus the same monthly fee, for a much much smaller feature set. if anyone, they deserve more consideration and newer hardware.

That sounds awful... very much like the Vonnegut story "Harrison Bergeron", which I highly recommend because it highlights what goes wrong when you try to make things "equal" by crippling achievers.

I think they deserve what they paid for - dedicated servers that the set up fee was specifically stated to finance.

I think the corporation has an ethical obligation to live up to that commitment - tho it may not have beeen included in the contract, it was very much implied if not directly spelled out/written into to the papers....

I stated this elsewhere... some level of performance inequality is acceptable.. I can't quote or even "shit" numbers... but...

For an employee to say, if you don't like the performance in your sim, move, well.....I can't express my concern adequately. I really can't - and am, for one of only a few times, nearly speechless.

i agree. the rotational system was a bad idea all the way around. but i think it's implied to people that purchase land in newer sims that they can expect that latest hardware as well. at least at the point in time that the sims are added. that obviously means reverting the older sims to the older hardware in the initial shuffle.

now i do think it appropriate that, as the colo retires and replaces equipment, that should follow a fifo list so that the very oldest hardware is replaced with the very newest. adding new sims and replacing outdated hardware are two different things.

considering that they have to do something other than random assignment everytime a sim is ipled, what method of rotation would you prefer? seriously, how would you manage this? i see some political and customer service holes in their plan; but i don't have a better one.

I'm generally very amicable and supportive of LL's decisions, but this one really pisses me off. In essence, people who have bought and kept land in the older sims, are going to be punished for creating destinations that have lasted for more than a year. "Congratulations for your dedication and staying power. As your reward we're giving you our slowest hardware." Nice.

I don't quite think they're saying they're giving you the oldest hardware. I think the issue is that they are already on the oldest hardware, and they are brainstorming on how to make it so that isn't always the case.

Nope. Sims weren't tied to specific machines. It was luck of the draw, and after a grid reset or server crash your sim might come back up on completely different hardware. Now in order to make sim performance predictable they are relegating the slowest hardware to the oldest sims.

I'm all for predictability.

This hodgepodge "pick a machine" system doesn't seem very efficient, as everytime a sim crashes all of that information would need to be distributed to a new machine.

Unless you are talking about hardware failures, which necessitate replacing the machine. Warm boots seem hardly a reason to move all that information to a new machine. It's already on that machine, and it can be back up in seconds.

I'm not sure how this all fits in, but if LL ever decides to lease the server code so that people can host their own sims, they will need to get rid of this centralized system of pushing sim 'images' to new machines everytime something goes down and needs to come back up.