is SL about to be sold?

I agree with Cybin and Margot that SL is a land of dreams. I, personally, wouldn't sell it out for any amount of money. And I think Philip feels the same.

and if a better world appeared on your scanner? would you leave planet Second Life? or will you always stay here rubbing your 'Linden' branded little alien backside?

Are you a loyal little alien?

Ha-ha-ha. Good joke, almost fell of the chair laughing!

Guess what Google runs their stuff? Normal, can-fail-anytime type PC's. Okay, they have a special system, that's highly redundant. They're using ten thousands of cheap PCs.

While Linden Labs must have it 'one reliability level higher', you're not gonna convince me all the sim servers are the most expensive server computers on the world. They might be blade servers, which can be easily put into rack, easily pulled out and replaced upon failure. Maybe it has a simple RAID mirror disk, but maybe it doesn't even use the disk that much.

Let's see... there are about maximum 15 000 prims per sim... That might easily fit into a couple megabytes of RAM (and on disk, it wouldn't be that much more). We also have parcel information, land layout, those aren't even a megabyte total, I guess. I think all else is done dynamically, in the memory. Textures are on the asset server, so that's not a problem, too.

So what a sim needs, is MUCH processor power (dual core, 2 or 4 CPUs), and some hard disk space for data (and some more for the uniform Linux OS with the programs). Though I wouldn't be suprised if all the 'important' data came from and went to a network attached storage. Of course, the CPU must be on the budget, too. No need for the most expensive one, just get the best price/power ratio one.

A server goes down? No problem, replace/reroute it, it will resume where it last saved it's state (maybe a few minutes or an hour of changes will be lost, not that a biggie).

SL just came off an upswing, and isn't growing as fast anymore.

Check the stats

That's nice, but completely irrelevant for SL. Google achieves redundancy because any given box does exactly the same thing. If it goes down, it doesn't matter, it just gets marked dead, requests are sent to another box. Your requests last less than a second, in the worst case the box dies right while you're making your query and have to reload.

On SL though, each box keeps up to 4 sims up. Imagine say, all of FurNation (to put an example of an area that seems to be large and well populated) going down for several hours. That's quite a lot of annoyed people. Even if they get moved to a spare box they will still all get kicked out first.

UPDATE: Google images for "google servers". Do you see lots of beige boxes? I see racks with blades. Those are cheap of course, but aren't precisely the kind of thing people use at home.



What, you call $3000-$4000 for a 4-way server expensive? That's the cheap stuff. I can easily find you a server for $15000, and I think the Itanium boxes can be had for even more outrageous prices (not that I think it's a good idea to buy them).

It's not expensive, it's prefectly normal. You don't get good reliability by buying the cheapest board, RAM and power supply. The computer I run SL on is a dual Athlon, must have been about $1500 total when it was new (cost me less than that because I reused disks and such from the one it replaced)




Don't forget the scripts though (2000 scripts x 16K = 32MB), and physics, and it's not necessarily all that compact. It's easy enough to use several times more memory to organize your data than it actually uses (say, linked lists, trees, hashes, etc, have an overhead). You can even have more overhead than actual data.

But yeah, memory probably isn't a very big problem here.



Right, needs processing power. A dual core Opteron, as I said, is about $1000. So that's $2000 already in the box that goes just for the CPUs. Add the server board, RAM, SCSI card, disks, case, power supply, and it easily goes up to $3000-$4000.

You won't get the CPU for cheap for a simple reason: CPUs with SMP support are expensive. That means either Xeon or Opteron. Dual core Opterons costs about $1000 each. And IIRC, Opterons *require* registered RAM, which adds another bit to the cost.



Well, this is speculation of course, but SL doesn't necessarily work this way. For instance because when a sim crashes it tends to become unavailable for some time. I've seen Lusk down for several minutes. Assuming something like this in place, using a spare server could have been a matter of seconds.

It also complicates things if they plan to let people use their own servers. Your hardware should be your problem, which would almost certainly mean your sim isn't getting moved to a Linden box if your fails.

that's still an up swing. it is just not as pronounced.

There been alot of news resently bout LLabs being ready to be sold. Rumors have been around for what 6 months atlease.

Madame , we might never know until the dau it might happen but then again LLabs is full of surprizes

There's another complication regarding player-owned colo boxes, that I don't think I've seen addressed: security.

Specifically, how does the network admin staff know, without thoroughly investigating each non-LL server that's brought in (for which they may or may not have the time), that an insecure box wasn't put onto their server network's LAN that could compromise LL's network? Or that the user's box wast locked down when they brought it in, but a security feature was loosened for the sake of working on an issue then never re-tightened?

I don't know about you, but I can't say I'm keen on the notion that some J. Random Goober who gets his box h4xx0r3d will be potentially giving net.assholes access to rather personal or important user information, like phone numbers and credit card info.

Note that I'm not saying it's impossible that LL's network couldn't get hosed without having user systems on the server network LAN, but it's a hell of a lot more difficult when the admin and/or his/her staff don't have to keep track of what custom cruft some goober has put on their box in the heart of Really Important Shit.

Because, after all, we all know the internet is serious business.

I'm still not sure Lindens want the 'top notch' server for a sim, I think they possibly make compromises (blade server with IDE disk or central NAS for the data, no SCSI, not the fastest processor on the world, etc).

But if you look at the $4000 number, that means 4 sims, that is being payed for already at setup. It costs 1000 USD or more to have an island/sim set up. So voila, all the server has been paid for! I still think it might be more like $3000 or less per server, but that's not that big a difference.

By 'replace upon failure', I meant manual/scripted actions so that the bad server is shut down, and the fresh standby is loaded with the data and started. Also, many times maybe only the server software goes nuts on the machine, not the hardware, so only a program restart is needed.

Besides, I think most sims still run on the same processors/servers that they ran a year or two ago. Of course, eventually they might get replaced, the slowest ones finishing life as water sims, that hardware upgrade adds to the costs. New sims are always new hardware, I heard, and thus are faster.

I really doubt they are dumb enough to actually buy servers they should be upgrading every year. They are probably leasing so they upgrade often and to cut back on overhead.

Sure, but it still costs. All dual core CPUs are expensive at the time. I'm sure we'll eventually have them for $200, but we're not there yet.



Yup, exactly what I was saying. What I was trying to do is to provide a reasonable answer to why it costs so much to have your own sim, and why it isn't getting cheaper: Because you're paying for the hardware the sim needs. They could buy older and cheaper hardware, but that makes little sense as it'd limit growth.



I'm quite sure they have that, but it's not precisely what Google does. My understanding of the Google model is: Get lots of cheap boxes, distribute requests between all of them. Every box gets a request, processes it, forgets about it. They all are constantly monitored, and if one dies, it's just removed from the list and the admin fixes/replaces without hurrying much.

This kind of setup is just fine for Google, but isn't really good for anything where a server going down involves 20 people noticing how everything freezes and having to re-login, possibly with loss of data (unsaved scripts for example)



Makes sense.

I would have posted to this thread earlier, but it was just too entertaining. It is fun to read the various dire and pessimistic predictions about SL and LL when my own expectations are so optimistic and bright. I was especially enjoying the speculations about Philip cashing out and selling LL since I know how much fun he's having and how devoted he is to this project. The idea that SL is about to go static with no new development is so funny from my perspective that I suspect someone was trolling.

As far as I know there are no plans to sell LL to cash out. Personally, I believe that the potential of online entertainment in general, and virtual worlds in particular, is Very Big so it doesn't make sense to me that anyone who is still having fun would cash out from such a promising project like SL. That said, we have already "sold" pieces to LL to investors who believe in the success of the company, but that is the typical way startups get money from venture capitalists.

As to the speculations about our server hardware... We already publicly described our basic layout somewhere (in fact, we once gave a tour of the facilities to some Residents less than a year ago) but I'll give an overview here. The simulators are run on multi-core 1U pizzaboxen. These are not blades -- each server comes in a box with power supply and fans -- however they aren't gold plated servers either, they're just medium-cost servers. At the moment I think the new ones have dual-proc dual-core 64 bit AMD motherboards. The most interesting thing about the simulator machines is that we now buy them a rack at a time, pre-installed and wired in. Each new rack is wheeled into the colocation facility, bolted to the floor, and plugged into power and net.

We also have some silver plated servers that we use for the database, assets, and big backups. The whole system is a bit complicated; the simulators are just the most visible and obvious part of it.

Hey Andrew, can we get a sense of whether or not SL business model is cash flow positive or at least break even?

This would go a long ways to assisting many of us in making decisions on whether or not to further invest significant resources into SL.

Sell why sell?

*****

LL can invite IRL companys to joint ventures.. some are already in SL (No names).. some are waiting.. some want to set them up .. some planing...

I only wonder what happens to SL and all us - that day IRL company start to mass produce the things we all now do by small - for fun groups or single for fun persons (avas)...

Thats my - some scary vision - of the SL future...


They say IRL that competition are good.. but I doubt that all kind of them are ->> especially IN SL from outside IRL into SL <<-- are NO good for us...

/Tina

.....and how many employees are you today at LL???

*sigh* you sound like the way I was in my twenties. Ahhhh youth...it is such sweet innocence.

Phillip has bills to pay, so do other LL employees and shareholders. Especially bills of a CTO, CEO run kind of high what with all the luxury and charm that needs to go with the letter "C" and all. So if someone made the right offer, Phillip would not hesitate for a moment, not one moment. Put enough zeros at the end of a check and SL is for sale.

I am sorry to rain down on the feel good parade but at the end of the day SL is just a piece of software.... nothing more. Aww that just made me feel sad.

Troy

Is any progress being made toward 'secondlife://' as a protocol, a standard, like http? Or, are we years away from that?

True, to some it's just software, but in our minds it's so much more.

Now this is where God comes out and reboots the universe. Just to teach Troy a lesson.

Remember the end of TIME BANDITS?

Well I'm happy you were entertained by people's attempts to make sense of various SL happenings Andrew. And it's good to hear that Phil is having such fun.
However quite a few customers aren't having as much fun these days as they have had in the past due to various issues, largely due to LL's continual tinkering with SL in ways that don't seem to make much sense, or enhance the SL experience for customers...



That's amazing! Now the source of the huge gobs of land that keep appearing is explained!
It's not some strange idea of how to control the economy by destabalizing the land market, just that it's easier to roll in an fully loaded server rack, plug it in and start it up...
Thank you for clearing that one up - quite a few of us have been wondering what on earth's been going on - and it's as simple as that.

These are both quite possible, but I just don't see Philip leave any time soon. Just call it a guy instinct!

Regards,

-Flip

* Blows Flip a kiss *