Huns Valen
Don't PM me here.
Join date: 3 May 2003
Posts: 2,749
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07-07-2006 08:57
I have a question about Class 3 & 4 servers. Is there a plan to eventually replace all Class 3s with Class 4s, and if so, is there an estimated time of completion? I did quite a lot of flying around yesterday (the vehicular kind) and noticed that when the controls were sluggish, I was almost always in a Class 3 simulator (with this tool: http://neighbours.maxcase.info/) Conversely, nearly every sim I checked that had good performance was a Class 4. The main exception seems to be sims that have over 4,000 active scripts. Tangent: How is Mono coming along?
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Torley Linden
Enlightenment!
Join date: 15 Sep 2004
Posts: 16,530
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07-07-2006 14:08
Asking about this...
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Andrew Linden
Linden staff
Join date: 18 Nov 2002
Posts: 692
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07-20-2006 13:53
There is no plan in place to replace the class-3 hardware (dual proc AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 242 1.6 GHZ) with class-4 (dual proc Dual Core AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 270 2.0 GHz). That said, it is likely the class-3 hardware will go out like the class-2's which were replaced when their power consumption and physical volume became larger than they were worth. We're saving money in the long-term by replacing class-2's with the class-4 machines for a much higher CPU density and lower power draw. At some point it will make sense to replace the class-3 hardware with class-5, but I can't speculate when that will be.
There is room for squeezing better performance out of the class-3's. They are 64-bit machines but we're currently running SL servers compiled for 32-bits... on gcc-2.95. We expect performance gains when we move to gcc-3.x which is a pre-requisite for compiling at 64 bits (which also should provide a modest speed boost) as well as for the perpetually postponed update of the Havok physics engine. I'm supposed to start working on making the code gcc-3.x ready by the end of this week.
On a related note, Ian Linden ran a benchmark a while ago that suggested that the SL servers might run Much Faster in 64 bit mode... on the class-4 machines. There are some big boosts possible when taking advantage of some of the memory cache goodness of the dual-core CPU's in 64-bit mode. When that happens, it might actually accelerate the timeline for retiring the class-3's.
As to MONO development... I think Babbage Linden is still working on it on the side. As I understand it, there are some up and coming features in MONO that are important for how we want to use it, and Babbage has been coordinating with some of the MONO development team to figure out who is going to work on them and when. I don't know what the timeline looks like.
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