Ian Linden in MySQL Interview
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Taco Rubio
also quite creepy
Join date: 15 Feb 2004
Posts: 3,349
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03-07-2006 18:31
Herro, I found this link today while searching for something else. I found it to be an excellent interview, as he didn't get so technical as to be foreign to non SQL people, but did cover some interesting stats on where LL is as well as a neat Havok idea. http://dev.mysql.com/tech-resources/interviews/ian-wilkes-linden-lab.htmlmight be interesting to others, might not. Taco
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From: Torley Linden We can't be clear enough, ever, in our communication. 
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Iron Perth
Registered User
Join date: 9 Mar 2005
Posts: 802
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03-07-2006 19:25
Wow! What an article. Here are some of my favorites, but really, you should read it yourself! From: someone
Ian: We have almost 70 full time employees and around twenty part-time liaisons.
"Of the 70 FTEs (full time employees), about 22 are programmers working on SL itself. At any one time probably 1/3 of the team is on infrastructure, 1/3 is on new features and 1/3 is on various maintenance tasks (bug fixes, general stability and speed improvements) or improvements to existing features. But it varies a lot."
From: someone
"I think we’re going to jump straight to Havok 3 and simply skip Havok 2 – we’re a bit behind on that one… But I don’t think that’s the most exciting thing we’re working on. We’ve been working for almost a year on integrating Mono for our script execution, it’s hard to predict how that will affect things, but it’ll be big, of that I’m sure. Also, the graphics guys have some amazing plans .. As a replacement. But, we’ll keep the current engine around to run old content .. I just don’t think we’ll allow new scripts to be compiled for it."
From: someone
"Sunday afternoon is the biggest sustained peak, but it gets just as high during weeknights, just not for as long. Saturday is actually sort of a low day."
(my experience as well) From: someone
"We try to be like Google, but, you know, we don’t have their resources and they haven’t released their toolset. So SL is about, let’s see… 1100 servers right now, with about 2000 CPUs."
From: someone
"We’ve been buying 100% AMD for a while now as we’re constrained by power utilization – Intel’s server chips just suck down too much juice… But clearly they’re working on that."
From: someone
"I think we’re at about 250kW right now. WoW (World of Warcraft) can host a similar number of users with a much smaller amount of hardware. In that analysis, SL looks very inefficient."
From: someone
"And not, only when someone is actually there or only when there’s many people there. So, for the sake of efficiency, we may start to do that sort of thing, but we have to be careful how we do it. " Yoiks!!!
From: someone
"In MySQL, we have all the user accounts: who you are, what you’re wearing, what you have in your inventory, etc – your transaction history. Also, presence information goes in there, which includes what sims are running on what hosts, various things we need to know to keep the grid running."
From: someone "Lenz: So you can’t do your daily work in here yet? That should be fixed  Ian: Yes, we’re working on it, but that sort of thing is very speculative – it’s going to take a long time for SL to be that flexible. And, with all the growth we’re seeing, we do have to put a lot of time into scalability work, paying for past sins, as it were. " |
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Sansarya Caligari
BLEH!
Join date: 25 Apr 2005
Posts: 1,206
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03-07-2006 20:18
It really is a great article, and gives me hope for the SL future. Best thing for me is that I understood most of that Ten months ago I would have been, "huh?" through all of it. SL is not just entertainment, it's education! (good reason to keep logging in and reading forums)  |
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Khamon Fate
fategardens.net
Join date: 21 Nov 2003
Posts: 4,177
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03-07-2006 20:24
Thanks for the link Taco.
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Torley Linden
Enlightenment!
Join date: 15 Sep 2004
Posts: 16,530
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03-07-2006 22:34
Ian's precision scares me in a good way. If he was an X-Files monster, he'd be one of those guys who can communicate with insects and get them to formulate intricate geometric structures and don them as armor.
I'm gonna read this now, thanx for the link Taco!
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Argent Stonecutter
Emergency Mustelid
Join date: 20 Sep 2005
Posts: 20,263
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03-08-2006 07:11
From: Torley Linden Ian's precision scares me in a good way. If he was an X-Files monster, he'd be one of those guys who can communicate with insects and get them to formulate intricate geometric structures and don them as armor. <ykybpsltlw>I think I could script that!</ykybpsltlw> |
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Taco Rubio
also quite creepy
Join date: 15 Feb 2004
Posts: 3,349
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03-08-2006 07:25
From: Torley Linden Ian's precision scares me in a good way. Which is exactly what I like about his interview - facts!
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From: Torley Linden We can't be clear enough, ever, in our communication.
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Siobhan OFlynn
Evildoer
Join date: 19 Aug 2003
Posts: 1,140
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03-08-2006 07:39
Thanks for the link, Taco.
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From: Starax Statosky Absolute freedom is heavenly. I'm sure they don't have a police force and resmods in heaven. From: pandastrong Fairplay omgeveryonegetoutofmythreadrightnowican'ttakeit From: Soleil Mirabeau I'll miss all of you assholes. 
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Cocoanut Cookie
Registered User
Join date: 26 Jan 2006
Posts: 1,741
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03-08-2006 08:39
Excellent article. And excellent job of quoting from it, Iron. (And very funny Jon Stewart quote, Siobhan!)
coco
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FlipperPA Peregrine
Magically Delicious!
Join date: 14 Nov 2003
Posts: 3,703
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03-08-2006 09:24
Very cool article; its nice to see it acknowledged that a lot of time is being spent "paying for the sins of the past". A lot of the carrots, it would seem, have been "under the hood" lately in looking towards the future, which makes sense.
Regards,
-Flip
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Huns Valen
Don't PM me here.
Join date: 3 May 2003
Posts: 2,749
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03-08-2006 19:47
That's a neat interview. Personally I can't wait to see what the graphics guys are cooking up.
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