What does class 4 and class 5 mean ?

(For anyone owning class 4 Openspaces on January 1st, they will be upgraded to class 5 by end of January, to further improve the experience people have on those regions.)

Jack wrote the above in his message, I don't understand what that means .. can someone explain it to me please?

Class 4 was the previous generation of server box that SL ran on. Class 4 had an Opteron 270 (2 cores) and 2 GB RAM. Class 5 has a Xeon 5148 (4 cores) and 4 GB. Sims on the older servers don't run as fast.

(Just to add: yes, they only run half as many sims on the old hardware.)

I was hoping that it would mean we would get more prims for the price increase ..lol

Not sure that's entirely right.

Both class 4 and class 5 hosts have two dual-core processors - a total of 4 CPU cores. All full sims are coded so that they run on a single CPU core so both a class 4 and a class 5 host runs 4 sims per machine.

AFAIK, no sim hosts run quad-core processors. Class 6 might but there's not a lot of info on how those are set up yet.

No difference in prims - a full class 4 or class 5 sim will allow 15k of 'em..

Yeah, I was thinking of the old class 3 for the number of sims. Those are duals, the quad xeons (53xx) came out a little after, SL punted.

Fewer cores per package isn't always a bad thing, especially with the way LL runs with sims pinned to cores.

I've speculated for a long time that the next hardware class will use CSI or some other NUMA-like bus. I know they have class 6 hardware already in testing - will be interesting to see if I'm full of it. I probably am. If they'd waited another 6-8 months, maybe.. Today is probably too early for them to move to CSI.

The Island we used to have was class 4. Then class 5s came out and the price increase. Being honest I don't remember a huge difference in performance between the two. Couple of caveats to that. I was and am absolutely ANAL about controlling lag. So on our island we only had about 6k of the 15k prims used and our script times were usually right around 4 ms or even less. People used to come to us to change clothes or sort inventory because it didn't lag at all ever even with 3 sex ball businesses ROFL. The second caveat is that the newer viewers might affect the difference between class 4 and class 5 performance more than the ones a couple of years ago. I just don't know.

I'm a little bit wiser now !!

The main difference as said by LL is that class 5 is more energy efficient then class 4. The performance differences are minor but it is just cheaper to run class 5's for LL.

here is the original announcement

http://blog.secondlife.com/2006/10/16/looking-forward-to-class-5/

Nice to know I wasnt imagining things back then

I think class 5's getting twice the memory as a class 4 helped a lot too, especially in high-load regions..

They still are running regular sims on class 4s though right?
Last time I checked the private sim my store is on is a class 4. They won't switch us to 5 without a $100 increase in monthly payments.

Yep. Some private islands and private openspace sims are still on class 4.

All the mainland is on class 5 services now.