Sim Owners Take Note-- Your Sims Are Sharing Servers

Oh ya I'm sure thay don't pay that for one quad-core server, and then they sell it four times. Actaully they don't sell it, they charge a set up fee. I'm also sure you can buy a helluva a lot of bandwidth for $295 (or even $195) a month.

Yup. You know, that's what was irritating about all this. They charge $1,695 to set up an island. That kind of money can buy a dual-core dedicated box and still leave a lot of profit to boot. Yeah, it costs a building and electricity to operate an individual box, but their customers are paying $295 a month! Such expense warrants a dedicated server box and the space/electricity it requires. So what if they have to set up a building to house several thousand servers. That's part of the cost of doing business.

At this point, considering the asset server situation, I'm not sure even that would eliminate lag. But I'd bet dimes to donuts it would sure reduce it a whole lot. We actually challenged LL to perform an open side-by-side comparison of identically configured systems running at the same speed, one on a quad server with 4 sims and the other on a single core with one sim. They failed to respond.

The point is, they didn't have to start stacking sims. It was a space-and-cost saving move that was focused entirely on the company and its bottom line with little consideration to the end customer who was paying the bills. Linden Lab claimed four sims to a server actually ran better than on a single box... but hey, that's nonsense. Like one tech said on the blogs, "Linden Lab, we're not stoopid."

Like I've said in the past, never had any intention of busting LL's chops. I'm just calling an ace an ace. They should have had more concern for their clients and ultimate system performance than in cutting corners.

Hoopefully they will open source servers soon. Seems like it could be a profitable business to be in even charging half of what LL does.

Hard to tell what might be next. There might be strong argument regarding advantages of allowing people to host their own sims, but personally, I'm not acquainted well enough with the server-side bandwidth requirements to determine such. Some folks are aware that even on cable internet, the download bandwidth (client side) is far greater than upload bandwidth (server side). It could be that most folks internet connections simply couldn't handle the stress. Not sure.

Oh ya, I don't think you would want to consider hosting a server on a residential cable or DSL line, even with 24mbps down coming to my area soon, the upload won't be nearly enough. That being said, I think even at the monthly cost of a suitable connection, or co-lo costs, its likely a viable business plan to undercut the charges of LL significantly.

Glad this thread is still around..sort of. Spent the evening reading. the. whole. thing! From the first, I thought Way was right on and LL at the very least disingenuous. Won't comment on trolls. Town Hall cleared up once & for all there ARE bugs and bottlenecks experienced as a result of stacking servers/sharing resources. Like we didn't know that. ;-| Actually, I did not know that a private SIM didn't come w/ it's own server. The knowledge that they share with other sims (that are highly likely to be lagtastic) absolutely kills any desire on my part to own a sim.

SO... I have been thinking about why peeps think their sim was on a "dedicated server" and other than the well documented history in this thread, the first thing that came to mind is the fact that some land sellers SAID SO in their ads! The original concept may have come via LL's original system and been mistakenly perpetuated by some Lindens, but LOTS of land barons have also made that claim. I suspect SL-ers have had more contact w/ land baron tactics & land sal ads than with any Lindens, so that's whose feet I'd drop this one at. I used to see that "dedicated server" tag line on a lot of land sale ads. They've cleaned up a lot recently--can't find any that are saying it now.

A sampling of current ads that are at the very least, misleading:

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"BRAND NEW LAG FREE HIGHSPEED WATERFRONT SIM."

FACT: No such thing as lag free.

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"$75 + $18 month 1024 sq meters 235 prims New Class 5 Server"

FACT: This was my first land purchase, in which the seller made no mention of the fact that this was for a plot on a SIM VOID or Openspace(!) until I tried to buy more land / get more prims and esentially ran out. I "used up" all the remaining prim allottment for the sim so they took the other 3 lots off the market. There were a total of 7 lots they were selling. This same land baron has *multiple* voids that they carve up into *multiple* lots (on some sim voids, as many as 13+ lots) and bill and "new class 5 server" land. Nothing in this ad says it's a "dedicated" server, but the point is, a reasonable person would not expect "New Class 5 Server" to refer to a sim that is run four to a CPU/server. Here's some OFFICIAL Linden blah, blah on open spaces:

"Whereas normal private islands run on their own dedicated CPU, the Openspace regions run four per CPU: this limits their performance, as you would expect. Openspaces only ever share with other openspaces on a server.

It is therefore important to understand what these regions are; they are provided for light use only, not for building, living in, renting as homes or use for events. As a stretch of open water for boating or a scenic wooded area they are fine, but we do not advise more serious use than this and will not respond to performance issues reported should you not use them in this way."

So they never should be selling MULTIPLE residential lots--if any(!) on these sims in the first place! Live & learn. I can now tell a void from a "real" sim practically on sight on the map. The sim I bought on would still fool me, though, as they've been marketed as regular types and when sold out, look like a regular residential sim. Now I know to look at the prim count for the whole sim. Full disclosure was not provided by the seller, but as always, it's caveat emptor.

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"Name Witheld) $500,000L/$75 Mo. Tier Fee/1875 Prims FOR SALE... Private Estate Island 65536 FOR SALE (not for rent). Full ownership rights & controls. Please IM (Name Witheld) with questions."

FACT: Sim is NOT really "sold," as it's part of Dreamland ACS, so Ansche Chung owns it as far as LL is concerned. Also re: a sim void...can't own one unless already a real island owner, AND have to buy in packs of 4...

BTW, I just "bought" a whole void/openspace sim for $590 US (before reading this thread; & at least this time I knew what I was getting. Since it's only for me to play beach bum, this works fine thus far), so the above is WAY overpriced for only 1875 prims (ya--I know, more $ than a real sim, but less "tier"--but I've seen the same sort of sims for sale for as high as $L 1 million. Pretty pricey for not having real ownership. AT LEAST they can resell on their own. My first land purchase has NO provision for that. I'm out all my upfront money when I go, so it was never anything buyt rental with a "deposit" IMO.

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This may seem like a sidebar to the thread topic, but I am stating that it's not just Linden that needs to practice better disclosure to clients!

Yes Caldora, I would agree that land sales ads are often fraudulent. That's a whole nuther area of disagreement with LL: failing to police their own system and stop nonsense like that. We are told they can't possibly do so. Well, other boards do. If a person can't possibly clean his house, perhaps the house is too large.

What I find almost laughable about all this is hindsight. When this post first began in Oct 2005, these things were virtually unknown. We had to physically gather the data to prove a point that now is well-known... that LL stacks servers. And even after all this hullabaloo... it still amazes me that when LL is getting ready to sell a sim, they don't email the potential buyer a prospectus of EXACTLY what they're getting and how those servers are set up and managed. But, they seem to be selling sims, don't they? I guess keeping the customer in the dark works.

But regarding hindsight... when one reads back through this post from the beginning, there were numerous claims made back there by LL that we now know to be pure nonsense. We can read those claims and (if a person knows anything about the last 2 years history of SL) almost laugh at some of the comments made by Lee in defense of LL policies. (Not busting Lee's chops. Just stating fact, as we have done from the first post on the thread). Claims that sharing hard drives, bus lines and network cards 'absolutely cannot' impact sister sims... only to learn later in this thread that it most certainly can and does (and really, didn't we know that from the start? Like the man says, "LL, we're not stupid.".

When we read back over the posts and see the now-obviously-ludicrous claims that were made both in defense of and smokescreening these actions, it's pretty obvious that LL was not being straight with its customers. And that's the bottom point folks. As stated from very early on in response to Lee's statements, this post wasn't about lag. It wasn't about sim performance. It wasn't about whether problems were server side or client side (although certainly all those things were involved). This post was about up-front-and-factual honesty when selling a sim and carrying through on agreements and providing the customer the absolute best performance for the serious money they have paid.

Now today, whoooboy, they're selling more sims than you can shake a stick at, which to me says that people will buy just about anything if it's the only game in town. But it won't always be the only game in town, will it? And when SL is no longer the only game in town... when a cheaper and better VR platform hits the market... will these problems affect their customer's decisions to remain with SL or go to the competitor? See, it's not how much cash they're raking in now. It's whether they'll be able to tomorrow. The performance of the board is well known. Lag and database problems are constant. They haven't fixed these problems in more than 2 1/2 years-- in fact they're getting worse. So what's next?

Today, if someone wants to buy a sim, that's up to the individual. But at this point in time, with the knowledge we have now, and especially being able to read back through these pages and see all this stuff laid out, there's no reason for ignorance in this matter. LL's policies and attitudes are pretty much known, their way of doing business is known and if someone decides to go ahead and buy a sim despite all these things... then they have no room for complaint about anything that happens in the way of performance or support issues. LL basically absolves themselves of anything and everything that might happen in a negative way, ranging from poor performance to intentional griefer attacks to outright theft of property. Whatever happens, they're not responsible and the TOS has been changed enough times to pretty much cover their tails (to an extent. At least, until a good attorney challenges it. LOL). So it's not like 2 years ago. Back then, we didn't have that information available. Now, the buyer is going in with both eyes wide open. That is, IF they happen to read this thread. Otherwise, they may be lead to believe they're getting a dedicated server with no lag.

Quote:

It is not fair for a single club taking up a 4096m piece of land to use all the assets of an entire sim. A single club holding constant parties and making it so that no one else can even enter their home land is not the way to operate a sim. That's why I agree with you in principle; prims are not the only thing that need regulated.

Unquote

The obvious (at least to me) answer is that since both objects and avatars use up
server resources, to charge for both of them. That would be a tier fee that includes
both land area and monthly average traffic. At the moment, only land is charged for,
so businesses have every incentive to minimize land (cause it costs) and maximize
traffic (cause its free), to the detriment of anyone else sharing the sim, or server.

DRN

Ian Linden: I guess, long term, expect that we'll try to keep the prices fair
Ian Linden: WE'RE NOT INTERESTED IN GOUGING OUR CUSTOMERS

Wait a minute...
At the beginning people cashed out $900something for a sim, which was running on a dedicated box/server.
Now people pay $1.250 for a sim that runs on a box/server with newer technology that handles 2 or 4 other sims?
Am i right? If so.. does that mean that LL takes the money from one sim customer to invest in one box/server and takes the other $1.250 or $3.750 as complete profit?
I'd call that pretty much gouging the customers.

Technology upgrades and keeping "cutting edge" often require monetary upgrades. ;p

Pretty sad. I was under the understanding that it was a dedicated server but today seemed to findout the different. My sim was running great untill sometime today after a rolling restart
All of a sudden my Region wont hold more than 40 users without having mainland type lag.
I got Concierge in Live chat and asked them what the problem was..

Linden Labs tells me that they don't really see anything wrong other than a High agent count .

(Only had 50 Users on Region at the time)) LOW USER COUNT!!!!

I tell them we have been able to hold 100 and not even be close to this kind of lag .

Linden Labs Proceeds to tell me that One other region on the server is running about 40 agents too though. One more restart could put you an a more empty server. or it may not.

After confronting them on the issue

Linden Labs Proceeds to tell me that Livechat is not condusive to maintaining this topic Dilbert. A personal conversation about the details of region hosting over the phone would be better.


All of a sudden they dance around the issue. I am highly upset
Basically paid 1600 to have mainland problems.. how ripped off i feel and totaly violated

Utter BS

letting others know about this BS this is seriously wrong...

Loaded our server down with busy sims and now i cant do the same as before .. basilcy paying for a reduction in performance.. to only pay out the butt for MAIN LAND LAG

Oh Dilbert I so sorry to here this!........But its strange they use to tell us that owning your own island would give you less problems less lag.........WRONG! Now they are giving people the run around as they say. Don`t you love this....50 in yor place is crazy! it can hold a heckof alot more and should! I sure hope things workout for you!


Usagi

Yes MAYBE better hardware!!!!!!!!!!!!! Cutting Edge means BLeeding Edge for thosae that pay alot of money and still get cut by bad proformace/Hardware on LLABS side.


Usagi

Dilbert, I had exactly the same thing happening on my sim after a rolling restart...the packet loss would fluctuate between 0.0 and over 30 at some points ....one moment OK at 0 and the next whoosh straight up to over 30 full on red.....after wasting days trying to find out what it was I was advised by another sim owner to do a restart and sure enough....its fine....whether the restart moved it to a different server or what happened I dont know, but it fixed it.

Yeah well we restarted several times. even had Concierge come restart it and see whats going on and they agreed its running poorly. and it is exacly like being on mainland now.. my business is being detroyed as we speak and they wont givve me any answers or any kind of help in the matter. always passing the buck and then telling me to submit a performance ticket.. well that takes about 1 week before you even begin to get an answer.. sad but true
I have 3 tickets in and sent on 3 days ago and absolutely not one answer or even a peep out of them.. Dont buy an sland stay on main land or leave sl it isnt worth being dorked around like this and deffinately now what a person pays for

Nexus, If I am not mistaken your class 4 servers are in fact class 5. Dual core Dual CPU servers. Class 4 are your class 3 etc..

It matters not about how many cores the MB supports, they all use the same fsb, system ram, memory and disk controllers, pipelines to the network, electrical conection, PSU and OS. Multithreading is a theory based on best guess to pre-empting a cache and carrying out some computations ahead of time, or in sync with API calls.
Any web hosting company would call these Virtual Servers, never dedicated. To be honest, the prices charged for the LL server farm, is at best extrordinary.

The figures are simple to calculate:
Dual Core, Dual CPU server, 2gb ram, 80gb HD, 10mbps ethernet connection = 1 Core, 512mb ram, 20gb HD and 2.5mbps connection.. and thats with 100% perfect balancing, which is never acheiveable.. and all that for how much??? I could buy a Top Spec PC for less than that with a 20mb+ connection, 2gb ram, 1tb sata II raid HD's... just send me the servserside software and the url links.

The whole business model for LL is based around a webhost server farm, enhanced becaused they can offer more than parking your website and aunties fav pics there. Havoc 1 engine is old hat and hardly worth the extra money charged for playing SL. LL are simply wringing out the last juice from the grape on that one.
When you buy a dedicated server for webhosting, at least you get to own it. With LL VR world setup, you get nothing, at best 1/2 a ram chip, some wires and a share of a HD, through the post. And you pay how much for that????

Many people feel that way with Island VS Mainland. It was a wave of trend for LLABs to promoto self law etc during these last 9 months or so. Now look conditions are worse, (support is nothing but well ......... JoK*). Instead of giving more power to island owner it caused island owners to depend more of CS. But then again it all depends how close you are with llabs that gives you the cozy support that one needs. Otherwise your only sending smoke signals.


Usagi

Well, if all is so awful, support so bad and the whole grid so laggy - why are you still here? You are all here on your own will, because you like being here, not because someone forced you, so we got to live with it, then. That's what life is about: choices. Make yours and stick with it.

And yes, the cost for the servers are higher than business servers somewhere else, yes, you would get much better machines out at competitors for that money, but some of you seem to forget one thing: it's not only about the servers, it's also about the software.

Lindenlabs has a quite big software engineering team to program their homebrew software, and that's why the server hosting fees are so high, to pay their programming staff mostly. Good software enginees cost quite some money. Not that it would help much the other problems, but that's why the costs are so high.

Huh?.......never mind...............

Problem is love LLABS servers are outdated

Huh?.......never mind...............

So I'm readying the "100" blog posts in today's post about the outage in San Francisco when I see some friendly person trying to help explain the server situation in Second Life to everyone... my emphasis added.

Post #67: http://blog.secondlife.com/2007/07/24/san-francisco-power-outages-and-stipend-payment-delays/#comments


So I guess this thread is about the only chance someone has of learning the facts of the matter.

Zee

If you want to have full control of your sims, support the group 'Make SL Open Source!',
or take a look at Open Sim.

/13/0f/199251/1.html

Big Deal... this is news? I've know almost since the begining that linden lab runs 2 to 4 sims per machine...

This is not any kind of "secret".

I've seen this posted many times over the past two years: "servers" are separate sim hosting environments (the sim software, proxies, and whatever other support software they need) and are one per CPU, whether it's a single core, dual core, or quad core... that means one, two, or four servers per physical computer. Sims are one sim per server. Openspaces are four per server. No doubt they will be going to 8 core systems in the near future, with up to 8 sims or 32 openspaces per computer.

Sims are not "one sim per server". Sims are one sim per CPU. That is the point of this whole thread.