two grids?

not convinced.

anyhow. what they have now doesn't seem viable.

Well he is half correct. UO has the ability to teleport you to different "grid" within the game. Half correct is because the two "grids" use the same server clusters. It only seems as two because the only way to get from one "grid" to the other is thru a portal.

But they are at the same physical location running on the save server clusters. The reason they are seperate was not to reduce lag or db relief problems. It was made that way because the two "grids" have drasticaly different rulesets when it comes to PvP.

You do not have to be convinced for it to be true. How they have it now is proven to be viable. Their implicatin of it is what is not viable.

Pretty sure I already stated this but they either have a coding problem or resource problem. The structure they use, as far as I can tell, is the same used in every MMORPG and it works on games that have 500,000-1,000,000+ users.

just because you claim it to be true doesn't make it so.

it was viable. but with these login problems, i'm willing to assert it's not.

if they fix it, then it'll be viable again.

given that signs of this problem started months ago... i'm not convinced they can fix it.

tuesday will tell.

in the meantime, i think it's interesting to explore the other options.

i think the issues you raise are important to consider. i don't necessarily agree with them. but your issues do give some shape to the problem.

Actualy, I stated I can not claim it to be true in LL. I have no knowledge of how LL specificaly does their "handshake". I can only view it from the outside and determine it looks like what I have seen personaly before and what I know some other games use. In those games they can handle 500,000+ players, so the method is viable. The implimentation of it might not be viable



I agree on both accounts While I agree something needs to be done, I do not necesarily agree with your ideas on how to fix it. Hey that is a good thing though, if we all agreed to everything it would be quite boring in the world.

They have two grids - one is a mirror of the other with portals between the two.

To expand on what Sox said:

The reason of the two grids is that each one is identical like Sox stated but they each have a completely different rules set at server level. One is a PvP grid, the other is a PvE grid. The portals were put in place originally so players had to take an active conscious decision to move between the rulesets.

They have since made it alot easier to move between the lands. You can now use the same port system as wizards use to just use runes made in the opposite land to port back and forth.

That will is not the samething you are suggestion from my understanding... as this system requires the lands to reside on the same resource cluster. Your systemw would require you to log out of one cluster and into another cluster.. basicaly logging out of the game and back into the game but within the game itself.

i wasn't thinking of having them mirror each other.
the grids would be separate places, just using the same client and server software.

though portalling sounds hard.

oh i don't think my ideas will work. i was just wondering if they might.

what's happening right now doesn't inspire me with confidence.

i was thinking maybe something more radical might be interesting. maybe.

like i said when i started this thread - just some idle thoughts.

Sure they might work for the grids, but you are still not even dealing with the current issue and that is the login servers not the grid servers. These two enities are completely seperate physical server clusters.

No company will ever have the login servers the same physical servers as the grid server cluster... way to insecure and unstable.

I am not trying to judge your knowledge but I do not believe you even beging to know how or what a login server even does. We already know LL's use multiple servers and switches those servers around for the sims. Without a login server to handle which IP's those current servers are running which sims you would not be able to log into them. You can not just tie sims to the same server all the time or you would have sims crashing alot more ingame.

The system works, it has proven to work, it is rock stable when you have the resources and tight code behind it to work. What we lack here is either the tight code or the resources to handle the traffic. From what I have read in other threads now but those that been around for awhile it seems they had totaly redid the login code at 1.6.x.

Now you can take two stances on that. Since 1.5.x it seems SL has grown quite a bit, possibly more then the current resources are able to handle. Or you can take the stance that LL rewrote the login sftw badly and has alot of bugs in it.

I take the stance that it includes both. From LL's own posts they say there will be a software fix on Tuesday, this tells me they did indeed find bugs with their newly rewrote login sftw which must not of been tested all that well. (I know I could not, and still can not, access the beta site.. that means there are alot of players unable to access it as I heard it has a very old user db driving it.) I also believe that the rush of new subscribers is also most likely pushing the current server setup to its max, this is evident to the lag we experience in-game also, but that could also just be sloppy programming.

In the end, the only people that truely know what needs fixed is LL. They will not tell use directly, no company would. I do agree with you that this is unacceptable level of performance and must be fixed.

Quit mangling Neal Stephenson's words, Khamon. Second Life is the metaverse! This is The World. Please at least try to keep it straight.

how'd i miss this?

sounds like it would be possible to set up multiple grids...
and have they thought of a way to portal between them?

Multiple grid setup would be easy, they are not saying they can not do this. They are saying it goes against the perception and I might add the marketing of SL. SL is marketed as a single contigious world. That is one of the things that make it standout against other MMORPG games where you are breaking up players.

Not only this but that would have a huge impact on social, economic, and community experiences in SL. The whole concept of this being an experiment would go downt he drain in the process also.

Basicaly the whole purpose and philosphy behind SL would be damaged by such a move. Building a portal between the two grids would just add stress to the already bog'd down db as you would basically have to log out of one grid, transfer your character, his/her inventory to the new grid and log into that grid. If you just mirrored the two db's then we are right back to square one... over crowding of db.

maybe you're right, but the future hasn't been written yet.

you're claims sound reasonable, but aren't backed up by anything more than conjecture.

if you can get from one grid to another, it's not that different than tp'ng from the mainland to a private sim.

the experiment would change. it'd would still be an experiment.

a fixed philosophy that does not address the current situation is in for big trouble, but there's not particular reason why multiple grids with connectivity would actually affect the philosophy.

the point of going through this gedanken experiment is to find a way to not "add stress to the already bog'd down db as you would basically have to log out of one grid, transfer your character, his/her inventory to the new grid and log into that grid" if you make the presupposition you can't do this, then you won't do this.

i'm not talking about mirror the db.

lalalala

When you tp from mainland to a private sim you are in the same game world, same server cluster, same db, the same game. Unless I completely misundestood you, you wanted to make a completely seperate grid, using a completely seperate server cluster. If this understanding is correct than no I am not going by conjecture but by personal experience working with clusters. You would have to physically log out of Grid1 Cluster and logged into Grid2 Cluster or you would be ghosted on one of the clusters. Doing this is the samething as logging out of the current grid (cluster) and logging into another grid (cluster). The problem is not the grid (cluster) but the login server (cluster) and this would only compound the traffice this login server would already be doing.

This will not solve the existing problem though, right now the problem is the login cluster, not the grid cluster (though that does have issues also mind ya). You can split the grid cluster into 100 micro clusters if you wish and you will still have the exact same login cluster problem. You will, there is no way of getting around it, have one centerallized account db, this db will need to be accessed everytime someone log's in and out of the game. It also needs to be accessed everytime you buy/sell land (as lindens has you teir up which affects your account).

Lets look at it this way... You are in a mainland sim, it has about 15 users currently in it, 425 active objects with 426 active scripts. The sim FPS is 52 because of the overload of active object, active scripts, plus 15 users all doing things at the sametime. We will call this Sim1. You get a TP to Sim2, you arrive and everything seems alot less laggy. This sim only has little under 200 Active scripts and sim FPS is ~300. You then get a TP to a private estate sim3, you arrive and you experience no visable lag. Active objects are less then 100, active scripts below 100, and sim FPS is ~2000.

In the above example all those sims are on the same server cluster. Yet they all have radically different performance. The reason this is, is because how clusters work. Each sim has its own server, that server is responsible for that sim only, if that sim gets overcrowded it will not bog down the other sims around it. That is why in the same grid you can have extremely laggy sims and extremely healthy sims all within a few sims of each other.

A cluster is nothing more then from 2 servers to hundreds of servers all "tied" together to create one huge server "grid". The reason the TP process breaks down at times is because every server cluster has to have a controlling server(s), and all requests for TP'ing goes thru this server. This server can get bogged down also or the server your trying to tp to is overloaded and timesout the request.

What I am trying to get at, though your idea is great, it will not fix the current problem and might just add to it in fact. I know this is an extremely over simplified example for those that know clusters and networks, but my intentions were only to give the basic ground work.

I admire and respect your views and willingness to find a solution that will work, we just need to know the exact problem, how their clusters work, and their internal network is setup before we can dive in and give contructive feedback.

I will leave this for others to explain as I am not a philosophy major or minor.. or hell even a beginer.