Letter to Jack Linden

Your post is excellent.. and most of it applies to us poor consumers as well as educators and charities.

Well to be fair to Linden Lab they have a similar philosophy, however it seems to be

"If we make an error, our customers pay for it".

Can some IT guy explain me the additional cost LL is claiming to have with the so called “abused” OS? The way I see it is, they have one server for 4 full sims and one server for 16 OS sims. Both servers have 4 CPUs on them.

So when we “abuse” the OS the server with the OS on, it has to work harder and slows down, which leads to lag in SL. But the ones who are suffering are the users. There might a bigger load on the network, but bandwidth cannot be the problem as it is so cheap, that it cannot be the cost factor they are raising to have.

I made a rough calculation and they will get 800.000 USD more from us per month with the price increase, or 9.600.000 USD per year (yes it is not a typo it is 9.6 Mio USD).

So can someone explain me what the additional cost of 9.600.000 USD are per year, that these so called “abused” OS cause?

As a corporate finance person I know that every company is working in finalizing its budget for 2009 and I fear LL is just using us to fill the gap. We also have discussions in our group to increase prices for 2009, but we do not just think lets increase the price on our best selling product, how many millions do we need? Ok lets increase the prices by 70% 2009.

So I would really love to understand these additional cost they are talking about.

Bravo -- very well stated!!! We could only hope that LL takes you up on your offer -- looks like they will be needing it from the thousands of angry posts on this forum.

i do hope openlife grid becomes a challenger to sl.....i only found it today and whilst i type i am downloading the software.

I never thought i see the day i leave sl but if this OPENLIFE GRID is any good and shows promise to be bigger and fairer than sl then i will leave sl.

I hate hearing all this about people being burnt by LL....i too will be burnt....i am willing to move on from sl....more people need to tell LL that...get on the wagon and tell LL we are moving if you move the price up!

Can some IT guy explain me the additional cost LL is claiming to have with the so called “abused” OS? The way I see it is, they have one server for 4 full sims and one server for 16 OS sims. Both servers have 4 CPUs on them.

So when we “abuse” the OS the server with the OS on, it has to work harder and slows down, which leads to lag in SL. But the ones who are suffering are the users. There might a bigger load on the network, but bandwidth cannot be the problem as it is so cheap, that it cannot be the cost factor they are raising to have.

I made a rough calculation and they will get 800.000 USD more from us per month with the price increase, or 9.600.000 USD per year (yes it is not a typo it is 9.6 Mio USD).

QUOTE]

Hi, IT guy here.

If you run 16 instances of an application on one CPU, versus 4 instances of the application on the same type of CPU, the CPU running the 16 instances will be carrying a heavier load because it will have to divide it's processing cycles up into more slices, which it then has to keep track of to share time and resources. This leads to higher energy use, more heat, and more frequent errors and/or crashes.

Keep in mind that, for all intents and purposes, there is little difference between the server software for full-prim sims and OS sims. It is the number of scripts, agents, prims, etc, that really throw a load onto the CPU.

I have four OS sims, and I've put 3500 prims, 250 scripts, and 40 residents into one simultaneously. Frankly, it was steady as a rock and practically lag free, way better than most mainland regions I've visited.

I've worked as a help desk person, a sys admin, and as an engineer, and I can honestly say that I can not imagine how a price increase like this is required JUST to provide more support for what essentially is a server farm. No way. It appears to be some sort of Orwellian economic sledghammer being used to...do what? Generate cash? Move people back to the Mainland, where land is stagnating?

Or was it done just out of ignorance, or worse yet, incompetence?

BTW, kudos to the original poster. Great letter.

Phelan,

NCI has much the same problem--though thankfully to a lesser degree. We lease a single OpenSpace sim—Nova Civis Caledon—from Desmond Shang. It normally has about 2000 prims, with the rest reserved for short term sandbox use. Normally it has from zero to three people, but for classes can spike up to 20 (about two hours a day) and for special events up to 60 people (two or three times a week).

Apparently under the previously withheld-from-the-users Linden Lab standards we are abusers. Who knew?

We are going to either have to come up with about 40,000 L$ a month (my guess--Desmond has not yet posted any price increases, as the situation is quite fluid), or accept new LL limitations that will make the sim nearly useless for us.

I guess the only good news for NCI is that since we are not a real world non-profit, we were already paying (via Desmond Shang) the normal price, so the price jump will not be as huge as it is for you.

You have my sympathy.