Demise of SL

I personally believe sl is coming to the end of its life span, I've looked into the technology of both the game, the internet and the home user..

Disclaimer: these are views from the point of a home user, opinions that make sense to me. if you don't agree thats okay, if I made mistakes and assumptions thats also okay.

Disclaimer 2: this is a wandering ramble

I believe we are reaching a critical point.

SL is something not many have tried before, the freedom to import your own content, the freedom to own land and do basically anything you want comes at a price, that price we are paying now.

There is a good reason why everquest, anarchy, neocron, sims etc go the way they do, controlling content, your in there world as they put it, every client has the same texture pack same content, the finite bandwidth is numbers and data of simple proportions and easily handled by the net and our local machines.

Our freedom is coming at too high a price, I will try to explain in the simplist terms possible.

1)Busting the illusion, your shiny 8mb connection is a marketing ploy, have you ever downloaded anything on your shiny 8mb/4mb/2mb connection and seen the little counter actually tell you 8000k or 4000k or 2000k, no its devided by 10 your 8mb connection actually has a max download of 800k .8mb and as for upload most of us are on 256k etc upload.

2)The internet is held together by sticky tape and people out to make money, there is finite bandwidth and it costs a hell of alot.

Some major points

ITS NOT LINDENS CODERS FAULT, please reread that, they could have the smartest coders the best ninja teams and it wouldn't make much of a difference because its the hardware of the internet and our own pc's that is slowing it down.

We are reaching a critical point of number of users V hardware and internet capability THAT is lindens fault simply because of the explosion in users since the introduction of free accounts. SL is becoming way too popular for its own hardware limits to handle.

SL is an example of a perfect theory a perfect world idea put into the real world.
Most of us when given absolute freedom become intoxicated.
your right you pay your fees its your right to do what ever you want.
How many GB of textures have you uploaded since you started ?

When we go to dance, is our first concern how we look or do we have these kind of thoughts going through our head.
"I won't wear my 100 prim Katana on my back it may cause slow down"
"I won't wear my 90 prim hair some people may have problems"
"I won't put on my 200 prim dress because of other people"

We have a lovely tool called the cache file, but it has limits your probably less slow down when your in a zone you go to regularly because your pc is storing all the textures etc.

Now remember your 800k or so ability to download, and think about all those textures and detail your system is trying to download as you simply walk from one sim to another, as you simply port into a new area, 6 people have just ported into my sim, my bandwidth, my internet pipe is trying desperatly to download every detail of there clothic and items.

I don't think lindens can fix this, and I know it would be hard for them to put a limit on a persons textures etc, although I believe free accounts should have a limit on uploads of textures and storage space on the dbase.

I really don't see a way out, every day more people join, we are far outstripping the technology, this type of free expression game shouldn't even be working its amazing that it does.

internet technology grows slowly but there is no such limit on our imagination and hunger for expression.

Better technology won't help sadly, a perfect example is the curly hair phenomenon, months back there was a problem with the detailed hair, people would quite politely take of there big hair for parties etc because of the unmanageble slowdown it caused, when lindens brought out a patch and said the bug was fixed, everyone started wearing there hair again to dances etc, yah may have improved the calc's and efficiency but does that help when the percentage of people wearing it skyrockets.

Give us all optical terrabyte connections and we would still fill them.

Its personal choice, I am looking at ways to improve my own sim, reduce the prim count, yes I pay $195 per month for the privalege of 15000 prims but just cus I can doesn't mean I haveto and I am going to slowly try to improve that little space I call home give sl a few more breaths.

I'm also going to remove my kitana when i go out and wear primless boots, im going to stick to the same clothing for atleast a week so those that know me don't haveto download a new image each time I visit them.

We are clogging the bandwidth of SL not the lindens it doesn't matter if they impose restrictions, I prefer to take a little responsibility myself.

Next time you complain about lindens or slow downs in sl look to the problems look to your finite bandwidth, to your friends who came to visit bringing 1200 prims and new images to your home (yes I did a test 3 friends visited with there full ensemble, shoes, dresses, hair, it came to 1200 prims.


We will make the differences, if at all possible.

On other games/sims they created what is called population caps, that may help, class everything we have now as server world 1, now create a server world 2, no interaction between the two except conversation through a text im.
you live here or there and when server world 2 gets to its pop cap they create world 3.
I know in EQ etc they created many worlds and limited members to a world. it would be slightly different, here due to sims etc but could be done. except for personal views and freedoms being slightly limited :/

Then it certainly the designers'. The system relies on a (mostly) centralized database for the storage and distribution of assets and like most small start-up firms, their ability to anticipate design needs three years hence approaches nil.

The gridded world was a pretty clever concept, but the asset system is a known bottleneck that does not scale as the grid does. Unfortunately, the asset system is so central to the design of SL that it simply cannot be feasibly corrected without a redesign of the entire system. Much of the visible work on SL over the last year has been in effort to tweak asset priorities so that everyone has a substantially reduced "experience" in favor of everyone having no experience at all.

The most clear evidence to refute your claim that the Internet is the bottleneck is the observation by many that they have an un-rezzed scene with no network traffic at all. If you have ever been at a bank and hear a teller say "sorry, the system is so slow today" you have witnessed the same effect; that teller's terminal is not being serviced because hundreds of others are being served at that instant by a system that must be centralized in order to handle accounts properly.

Wow interesting. I liked how you made suggestions too. The caps on population sounds interesting. I would so move to world 2 I dig firsts. I was almost afraid to read your post because of the title but I am so glad I did. Great read!

Cat

You don't actually refute my claims in any way anyone with a modicum of sense will know the internet and our connections is a bottleneck ask the person playing on a 56k dial up *chuckles* all your pointing out is other problems in the system.

there is another thing that is quite annoying with the asset server , as far as i know it never purge unused content, wich mean that eavery single texture tries, every time you hit the notecard save button is stored indefinitely ...

I don't see how we're reaching critical mass when the actual number of people logged in at any one time is not really growing all that fast, no matter what the actual rate of signups are.

And I don't believe that the lag and poor performance is down to the fact my 10mb/s connection isn't up to it or is a bottleneck, nor down to the fact the internet is fundamentally flawed. It's down to poor implementation of many aspects of SL.

But yes, I agree with you that being prim and texture efficient can only be a good thing. But then if we're witnessing the demise of SL, why bother, eh?

Interesting post Calranthe, but I feel that I should point out afew things:

As it stands, our current bandwidth is actually very sufficent. I am connected on a tiny 1.5MBit connection - and I rarely ever get into a situation where my bandwidth cannot handle the flurry of data that gets thrown over my general direction.

A large group of avatars wearing curly tory prim hair is not going to kill your connection - its going to kill your 3D graphics card.

Its true that the cache file is not sufficent for handling the mass of data that is SL - but then again, it is not supposed to. All it should really handle is access to data that has been allready loaded recently. There is no reason for said data to remain in your cache if it was not used for more then a day, or even less - much less.

Part of the real reason for slow loading of clubs and various sims is the actuall strain of the calculations carried in the current sim, regardless of sending you geometric and texture data - the sim is just over-burdained with carrying the weight of 30+ avatars and scripts. Try to load a people-free sim that is however packed with prims, and you will notice a dramatic improvement (Try Nexus Prime in Gibson - its an excellent example).

On regards for there being too many people - that is not really an unsolveable issue. Here's why: Almost everything in SecondLife is distributed.

The sims are individual servers - each with their own LSL virtual machines, physics, and whatever required to make the world go. It does not matter how many people are in SecondLife at one go - simply because, as long as there are less then 50 people per sim, it will work, and work quite well.

Unfortunatly, at its current state, SecondLife does have one problematic bottleneck - and its called the Asset Server.

The asset server is what hosts data such as textures, avatar profiles, objects and inventories, etc'. At its current state, its a single server cluster holding a massive amount of data - pretty much the entireity that is SecondLife.

There are many reasons for why the asset server is currently a centrilized entity and not a distributed one, but all in all - and the lindens agree - its design is a huge bottleneck.

They also agree that fixing this or changing its architecture would be a pain in the a**.

This does NOT mean that fixing this issue would be impossible - it just means that its going to be a pain to handle.

So, what i'm basicly trying to say is: Is SL in trouble? Sort of. Has been since the begining.

Is it going to die? Not anytime soon, and not from the failing to handle the load masses of people logging in.

The answer lays in distribution. The real question is, just how would you do it, and what will you have to compromise with to get it done.

With all due respect, you should try to be aware of the difference between kilobits per second and kilobytes per second. Confusing the two, as you clearly have, will result in your evident confusion.

Once you have grasped that difference, the huge conspiracy to sell 'fake' high speed internet connections should evaporate...

Having said that, your comments regarding the lack of scalability in SL are largely correct - sadly your confusion regarding bandwidth measurement early in your post may discourage people from reading further.

I apologize humbly for sullying your thread and appreciate your gifting me with an obviously much needed modicum of sense. I assure you, it won't happen again.

Huh, and here I thought that both account signups and average amount of people signed in at any one time were continuing to steadily grow at a 20% rate? Its easy to get down into doom and gloom scenarios with SL. My recommendation? Take some time away and recharge. When you come back after some time away, you realize what a truly wonderful blank canvas it can be.

We've seen these "Demise of SL" threads in various forms every few weeks since version 1.0 - or, if you're Eggy, since beta! Yet it continues to exist and grow. Does that mean we should be satisfied or rest on our laurels? No, as its still definitely a work in progress... and like all art, until its complete, its messy as hell.

I also have the feeling that version 1.x of SL is now somewhat in "maintenance mode". There have been many lessons learned from version 1.x. My guess (and this is a total guess, no FIC info here) is that a 2.x version included the new renderer is being built separately from the 1.x codebase which will include many lessons that have been learned form developing the 1.x version. Think about it; there really haven't been any "world changing" features since version 1.4. Since then, its all been ways of testing ability to scale. These are lessons which could be directly applied to a new version and lessons necessary to grow further.

Necessary tunings like the recent "attachment culling" are necessary to prevent people who are ir-responsible - or simply just don't know better - from abusing the system. These will be built in systematically to address problems like the abuse of attachments you mention above (the "hoochie hair" problem).

If you look at many products, such as the Havok physics engine, more change actually occurs between the 1.x and 2.x versions than any other release. Subsequent versions, such as Havok 3, have far fewer changes. Your learn your major lessons and find your major design flaws during a 1.x release.

Just a few thoughts to consider. And the sky isn't falling.

Regards,

-Flip

The attachment culling was mis-named. It culls out everything, including lanterns on porches.

coco

Yeah our fundamental problem is that The Grid All Hail The Central Grid and The Asset Server All Hail The Central Asset Server don't scale well together but are intimately bound forever meaning, simply, that LL are going to have to licence the software for people to operate their own grids. It's a no brainer and they seem to be honestly working toward fulfilling that objective ASAP.

Calranthe has a point though. It's been stated several times through the years and always patently ignored by the population. The freedom to build and upload and texture and wear comes with the price of maintaining reasonably sized inventories and respecting other people's processing ability. We're obviously not willing to pay that price. This is the root of our suffering.

LL's fault is not being vocal, even demanding, about it. When Philip asked us to clean out our inventories a few months ago, we crashed The Asset Server All Hail The Central Asset Server several times by deleting thousands of objects en masse. One has to wonder, since they've never exercised the wisdom of capping our inventories, why he doesn't issue such a call every quarter or so. It seems that the population is willing to help one day at a time if we're prompted.

It did

Not even here a month and already predicting the sky is falling and the end of SL is near.

I think Doc Nielson and CrystalShard said everything that needs to be said.

Briana Dawson

I thought there was a scandal in Tech forums a couple months ago about Sims sharing servers but that each sim has its own CPU on a quad processor unit.

nnnnnggggggggrrrrrrrrAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAUUUUGHH!!!!
*rips his arm out and beats Flipper over the head with it*

Who is this Eggy of which you speak?

The asset server is just Apache. Surely there's people with higher concurrency rates than SL out there... and I can't really think of something easier to distribute and scale than a stateless server with idempotent requests.

I like your style, kid. *gives Khamon a tree cookie*

Well, SL has semi-decent performance with new avatars and crap performance with older ones. When I am on this account in SL, things are slow, laggy and most of the time I can barely move. When I log on my alt, eveyting is much faster, from the the point of logging in. The longer you are in SL the more it sucks.


The growth is relative. If you have 130,000 users and you have max 5600 on at one time, that is less than 4%. When we had 35,000 users and about 2,000 people logged in on average we had about 5%. So a smaller percentage of the population logs in at any given time and we still have about 90% dormant and non converting accounts. SL isn't really growing, it is all just smoke and mirrors.


People are expected to pay a lot of money for an unfinished product and the numbers speak for themselves, most people are not willing.

Maybe before calling someone a 'Baby', you doublecheck the date...

Eggy ripped his arm out and beat me over the head with it... in beta.

If I ever meet Eggy in RL, I think I'm going to be in for a beating! hehehe

Huh, I don't experience this at all. My avatar is much older than most, but I get about the same framerates on Flip as I do on my alts. The inventory does take a lot longer to stream in, but that's because I have 20-30 times as many objects (about 5500) under Flip than I do under my alt accounts. That said, compared to a lot of people, I do a good / responsible job of keeping my main account's inventory relatively small. Its too easy to be a pack rat in SL, that's for sure!

I find your math questionable at best. So 4% of the population is on at any one time now instead of 5%? That's not exactly a huge significant change or anything. As long as the total concurrent and total users keep growing, I don't know how you can call it smoke and mirrors. You also fail to mention that is the total number of accounts shown is only showing ACCOUNTS HAVE LOGGED IN IN THE PAST 60 DAYS, not the total accounts ever created (I had about 55,000 avatar name/key pairs in my database when SL hit user #30,000 according to the web site). With the change to free accounts, as well, don't forget; there will be many accounts who create a freebie, log in once, and leave. While that does naturally inflate the overall number of total accounts temporarily, it actually makes the fact that 4% at any time are logged in more impressive. The number will also self-correct over time, as after 60 days of inactivity, inactivate free accounts are purged. So... its definitely not shrinking, and definitely not smoke and mirrors.

As for unfinished products, I think singling out Second Life is unfair. All software grows and has bugs. The best selling piece of software ever - Microsoft Windows XP - wasn't ready for prime time until Service Pack 2 came out, over four years after its initial launch! That's just one of the millions of examples of people paying for software which isn't fully matured. Being part of the maturation process is part of the fun of computers; in your use of the software and interaction with the developers, you can literally help shape its final form. This is much more true in Second Life with Linden Lab than any developer I've ever been involved with on a project at this scale; you can actually be part of the idea, design and testing process. Is it for everyone? No. Is it cool as hell? Yes.

Regards,

-Flip

Haven't had this problem at all. And I'm old.

I am really sick of people dismissing the technical issues of others with the "Well it doesn't happen to me" My private island had tecture issues I was given work arounds by Lindens to resolve the problem (which never resolved) and people in forums were still like "Ohh I have never seen it so it doesn't exist". Whatever.

Flipper if you are impressed by 4% then you go right on being impressed by 4%. Those kind of numbers are not going to make SL a profitable venture, ever. Neither will the dismal conversion rate. Denying it really doesn't help the issue.

Microsoft is profitable, with a majortiy market share. LL?