News.com article on SL's scalability problems

That web page took quite a while to load, I wonder if News.com is having scalability problems..

I am also pretty sure this number is wrong: 2,579 servers. 2579 CPUs perhaps, but certainly not servers. Though... IANAL (I am not a Linden).

cute quote by castronova:

""Regarding (their) business model, I have the anxiety of someone who went out to explore a river," he said, "and I'm already 200 miles further than I ever thought I would get and there's still more river. Scary, but I have to keep going"

looking forward to designing my own client skin.

This IS interesting...

'Linden Lab makes its money off of land-use fees, the sale of its virtual currency and monthly fees paid by land owners.' (my bolding)

Now where exactly did they glean that gem of information? Could Phil have been getting a little ahead of himself perchance?

Me opens huge can of wurms and settles down to enjoy...

Philip mentioned this in a recent podcast. The transcript is available in announcements, I am sure.

They are/will be selling L$ they get from sinks.

They seem to mix things up quite a bit. It's servers nor CPU's per sim but cores. Basicly a 1U high unit with 2 dual core opterons can run 4 sims. In a 48U rack you can run hence 192 sims. If you'd move all current sims and other systems onto new servers you'd surely be doing fine with 7 racks of space. And as they say themself, the servers are supported by tier.

I found the fact that the CEO of the company that makes Puzzle Pirates was talking smack about SL, as if the two environments can remotely be compared.

Yeah, I can handle probably 50K concurrent users on a high end 1 CPU system for IRC.

Take that Pirate King!

This seems like a poor article. There is little point comparing an extremely dynamic virtual world to a standard MMO, especially something like Puzzle Pirates which is 2D boardgames and chat. The best comparison would actually be to typical multiplayer games like CounterStrike, each server is pretty much only concerned about itself (Although that sells them short on the communication they have to do to work as a grid).

The peak usage statement is also extremely misleading, they say that SL can only support 3 users per server compared to 116 of EQ2 where everyone knows that sims run up to 40.

However I do have doubts about SL's scaling. I don't think it's anywhere near efficient and optimised enough at the back end to cope with 10,000 users. Little about it seems "lightweight" and there should be far more distribution of processing to make full use of each node.



It takes two years for anyone to acknowledge this? It should have been a priority since day 1.

I've heard that the CEO of the company that makes Jenga thinks Second Life is an unstable platform.

In regards to the comment about "skinnable" user interfaces. I sure hope they don't do that. Didn't we learn anything from Winamp? Good design isn't about how something looks, it's about how it works. All skinning will do is make an already complicated and cluttered interface worse by making the experience different for everyone.

Skip

That's the sloppiest hack-job of reporting I've seen outside of a high school remedial English class. I would have liked to have seen it before it was spell-checked, just for the laugh value. I'm glad the editor took out all the leet-speek, though.

As to skinnable UI, think more along the lines of WoW in that regard, and not Winamp. Winamp had too much skinning going on for something with relatively few controls. It's the more complex systems like SL and WoW where customizability becomes a boon.

I'd love to help Linden Labs make that a reality, but I'm sure they will get it right in the end on their own. A lot of smart people there.

Jarod's hyperventilating so I'm gonna comment on this statement.




Okay well there's no way to comment intelligently on this statement. Infinity and "like Google" were just funny but ^this^? Oh God the wora'uld is doomed.

Yeah, Daniel Terdiman usually gets it right. He must have rushed this one out.

I'm sure if SL was cut down to the crappy 2d graphics, limited user interface, 2d drop puzzles and basic chat, yeah, it could run on 4 cpus too. With server resources to spare.

Since he was referring to useability, I believe he meant more than just a 'skin.' As it is, you can already change your UI colors. But I believe he means allowing people to actually *edit* the UI. Frankly, I don't see why this wasn't done a LONG time ago. Users already have proven they're more than capable and twice as willing to handle something like this, and it'd take a couple items off LL's To Do list.

Zomg! No one beat me to it!

Allow me to yell, in my best Ren Hoek impersonation:

"It is WE who have the scalable architecture!!!"



mwaahahahahaa!!!!

Yes, but the article quote is present tense, not future tense. And the only L$ LL 'sell' are the L$2000 a month 'paid' to Premium accounts.
As for getting L$ from sink income - do me a favour, you have looked at the figures?
And yes, no more L$250 signup handouts and no more basic stipends for new signups - but look at the volume of L$ still being pumped in.

All in all a very strange quote...

Indeed, I have looked at the figures:

http://www.virtualfuturesmarket.com/futures/view/pages/cntrl2.jsp?pg=allgraphs

Classifieds, "other", and Upload amount to about 20M L$ per month, or 60K USD per month, or 720K USD per year.

Well given the volume of transactions they have, I am sure their credit card transaction fees are not as high as what they are charging sellers - that would be a way they are profitting off of the sales of L$.

Yes, it's probably higher now, because currency traders are charged 3.5% even though it's not coming from their credit card.

The lindex became a revenue source overnight while no one (well, some were looking.

MOre than likely that line in the article was just a misunderstanding on the author's part of how the LindeX works. He probabaly assumed it was players buying from LL, instead of from other players.

By my estimates (which I posted on other forums) Lindex generates rouhly $1,500 to $1,700 in USD a day. That's probably what the article was talking about.

Puzzle Pirates 2.0 will actually be renamed "Particle Pirates", then they can talk.

Puzzle Pirates? WTH? Never heard of it! Is that anything like Butt Pirates??

SL will never be as big as something like WoW. Warcraft is for kids, teens, adults. SL is for Adults. Not sure how many teens really are on the teen grid. And as ya'll have noticed- people want games. They're really confused on SL. I've had friends who wouldnt bother with SL for various reasons: Nothing to shoot at, no orcs, no dungeons, and the usual "I'm not a graphic artist/programmer".

In a way this is good. That means those who want to be here will stay. Those looking for a gunfight/dungeon crawl will go elsewhere.

I gave up on games like Guild Wars. Too many idiots. Too many kids. Too many people being uber-picky on who they let into a group. In SL I dont have to stand around going "pick me! Pick me!!" I can enjoy SL MY way. Not a game designers way.