Old Sim upgraded to Class 5?

They did, you're correct. The significance of November is that if they're going to honour the sixty day notice period, they'll need to post notice of tier fee increases in November if they want to raise fees in January 08.

my land is all still on a class 3 and it is dying... please please let them update to a new class 5 heck even a 4

Thats not true, class 4 sims aren't upgradeable and you can only upgrade a class 3 in which your tier isn't raised either. it remains the same.

The Support people finally answered my question:

"We do from time to time upgrade mainland regions, but there isn't a set schedule for doing so."

Yeah, that's pretty much exactly it.

My guess is that eventually the class 4's will all break eventually anyway - anyone know the typical life of a bladeserver?

I wouldn't be surprised if the upgrading of sims happens more as people purchase those blocks of 4 water sims for the same price as a traditional sim. They use less prims, since they are used for boating rather than building, so the lower end servers are ideal for them. Perfect opportunity to upgrade mainland sims... the old hardware gets put to good use, and attaches revenue to them while allowing a performance boost in the mainland.

How do you find out if you are on a Class 4 or Class 5?

Class 4 voidsims are far, far worse than class 5 voids - the differences are much bigger than between standard class 4 and 5 sims.

Low end servers exacerbate the problems significantly (script capability, physics capability, avatar handling capability).

Ahhh, so even with the 1/8th prim restriction and no buildings, they are still bad for open water sims?

Max Case's tool is a general guide but our service provider has mentioned many times not to trust the server addresses - a recommendation that has seen truth.

Mystical Cookie makes some benchmarking tools - I'm not sure if they are out on the general market yet, or if I had a prototype - but with those you can see the moderate performance differences in standard sims and *enormous* performance differences in void sims.

Of course, a class 5 can be loaded down so bad as to make it near worthless - best way to tell is test empty sims against each other. Anecdotally, if you focus on script performance, you can still tell even in a heavily loaded sim if you have a sense of it.

Here are some class 4 sims to test: Caledon, Caledon Highlands

Here are some class 5 sims to test: Caledon Regency, Caledon Penzance

Some class 5 voidsims: Caledon Lionsgate, Caledon Primverness

(I don't have any class 4 voidsims but just ask around)

Not 'bad' per se. But not good either.

The performance, especially where avatars, scripting, and physics are concerned are such that there was once a quasi-rule: "don't rent void sims". Add even a modest small gathering of avatars and a handful of scripts, and you'll be lagged into next week.

I've easily packed 100 people into a fully loaded class 5 void with little trouble - in fact in some ways they do *better* than full class 4 or 5 sims because of the prim restrictions.

Prim restrictions mean that there are a lot less textures on those prims, eliminating much of the image cache problems most sims usually suffer from before anything else. Which helps performance a great deal.

Much of this will be changing with the advent of Havok 4 and Mono, but even so, the differences will still be pretty significant. At 100 bucks more tier a month per set, I would be very disappointed to have class 4 void sims instead of class 5's nowadays.

Thanks for the clarification! The "void sim" concept was still pretty new when I took my "break", so I was unfamiliar with so much of a difference in performance.

Just FYI the original continent's official name is "Sansara."

My guess would be that LL has started the process of retiring the class 3 servers, a desirable thing from their point of view because they only support half as many sims per unit of rack space as the class 4 and 5 servers. Just as all the class 2 sims were migrated to class 4 when class 2 was retired, the class 3 sims will move to new class 5 servers.

I thought it was the Heterocera Atoll and Sansara is south of that?

yaa! Lunata seems to have been upgraded to a class 5 sim, I think. It happened a while ago, but I have been very busy. Time Dilation = 1.00, Sim FPS = 45 most of the time! I perform the traceroute to the sim and it is now in Texas.

That's not official.

upgrade to dsl, your 14.4k modem speed is lagging badly, by about 2 years

Were you bored

A few weeks or so ago, I asked Jack Linden if I could pay to get my mainland home sim upgraded to be on a class 5 server. It's way better than it was last year but we still do get laggy sometimes.

He said that he thought ALL mainland sims were already on class 5 hardware. Said that they'd been upgrading as they went for a while now.

Zale and Aleksandr are on the mainland...