East Coast Servers!!

Sounds like a Discovery Channel show or something.... But why not have servers on the East Coast too? From what I've been reading in the Forums (and from SL Time, etc) I assume the SL Servers are all West Coast. Wouldn't Servers on the East Coast make it faster & easier for East Coasters to connect?

Yes they would, but if LL put servers all over the globe it would increase lag between sims. Imagine sinking into the ground for a couple of seconds every single time you crossed the border to Taco Bell.

Sounds like a great idea Tod69, but why stop at just East Coast, afterall those of us that live in Australia would love their own servers to dramatically reduce our ping times. And I am sure those in Europe would love their own too. Would really help alleviate the problems that occur with the bottlenecks on the different Trans pipelines.

Game companies do this all the time. The difference is most of those servers are seperate from eachother. Meaning Eastcoast do not communciate with Westcoast. SL is different in that in order to make the move from SIM to SIM trasparent it needs to be in one location for best assurance. Otherwise there would be SL east coast, SL west coast, SL austrailia, SL Asia, etc.

True. So how do these other more intensive online games manage it? I've tried several, and the load times between areas are about the same as teleporting. As far as having to wait, we're already waiting for stuff to rez so...

And having seperate, but accessible, servers for these locations would be interesting. It'd be kind of neat knowing that if I teleport to Server Japan, I'd find (possibly) lots of stuff & people from that country.

MMO games have servers like this:

East Coast 1
East Coast 2
West Coast 1
West Coast 2

None of the above servers talk to each other ... they are completely independent, and each one contains a copy of the ENTIRE game. (It's possible each "server" is actually a small cluster of machines for load balancing, but the point remains that East Coast 1 never needs to talk to West Coast 1.)


In SL, the entire world is NOT contained in a single server. Instead you have:

Boardman
Acontia
Jubei
Abbots
etc.

There are over a thousand of them IIRC, and they all talk to each other constantly.

If you moved, say Boardman to the East coast, it might (*might*) speed up logging in. But as soon as you crossed the border into whatever sim is next door, you'd be right back on a west coast server. Worse, both zones would become horribly laggy for everyone instead of slightly laggy just for you, since everything the servers say to each other now has to cross the entire country, instead of a single room.

Right now, SL is not designed for a distributed grid. That's something that will come eventually, but for now, it would serve no purpose.

The longterm view that some Resis are hoping for is that SL will become "open-source", or at least, it'll be possible to host your own server in a foreign land.

There's a word here, SHARDLESS. Sharded servers are common with many online games. SL, however, doesn't use shards.

Yeh, but imagine having that load time hit you every time you crossed a sim border, and hit you again when you turned around to look behind you to see what happened...

If they ever test a distributed grid, East Coast servers would be a good place to start.

Otherwise, don't bet on it.