Investors wanted for datacenter idea

Besides the free hosting SLexchange allows it's merchants to have, there really is no where a non-premium user can put their vendor servers. So I have an idea that would allow residents to rent around 10-15 prims each for around L$50 a week to get a small place they can place their servers.

I am looking for someone to let me use their tier. I will split the profits 50/50 with them. Contact me in-game if you want to be involved.

(If more than 1 person comes forward to help with this, profits will be divided untill everyone gets an equal share.)

Please warn the rest of us what sim this is going in, unless of course you intend to buy an isolated one - the script lag stacks fast.

It was all I could do not to let go of my ethics, and let Caledon residents dump all their data servers somewhere. Tempting, soooo tempting...

One 4096m parcel full of servers could be some seriously bad mojo for the neighbours, depending what's in it.

I have tier, look me up IW.

but.. a premium user HAS land?? usually.

I have a datacenter in one of my private island, but never advertised it.
Mostly use it to host friend's server

Area 51 - Datacenter
Or something like that

I'm wondering what's the best... A datacenter on mainland or on a private island ?

In private island, if you want to move them in another place... you have to rerez the server (and the uuid change).
If you rent in a datacenter, you expect it to be online lifetime (moving server is a pain).

On the other side, a well managed private island have better performance. And a well established island owner is safer than a mainland resident, and usually provide better services.

mmmm... so ?

The best answer is "host your datacentre on your own island" For those who can't afford an island... sell more!

I'd personally be worried about the script impact of lots of dataservers in one spot, and I'd expect anyone who's business is small enough they can't afford their own land is small enough they can either manage without networked vendors or update all the vendors when the server UUID changes.

So.. please don't open your datacentre in my backyard.


I'm going to be watching script load carefully once the island I share opens up... I expect it to have a half-dozen data servers for our networked Vendors, and if they are too laggy I'll have to bite the bullet and write my own that is optimized for our needs.

While I think I have a pretty good idea of what a RL datacenter is, I am not sure I understand what the term entails in SL.

Would anyone be so kind to give a concise explanation of what this would be in here?

TIA...

In Second Life, there are networked vendor solutions that run in a prim.

For instance, an LSL script will communicate with an external website to deliver items, collate sales data, distribute payments proportionally, &c. "JEVN" is the name of one of these handy devices; SLExchange or SLBoutique 'magic boxes' are others.

A data center is a bunch of these in one place - ideally an established, long term location.





In and of themselves, they are pretty harmless. In small numbers, fairly low script lag too.

But what people do, especially with JEVN servers, is 'categorise' items and use multiple JEVN servers for selling a lot of items. It's not the JEVN server's fault at all - it's simply how some choose to use them. I've known people to use literally 20+ JEVN servers at a time, when one would do. Simply because they could.

The result is a *very* high density of scripted prims in a data center, if it's successful.

Think: 24/7 packed Noob dance club for LSL scripts instead of avatars, and you'll have a good idea.

Esmay should release some Pink&Flexi JEVN server that blink and poof every time someone use a vendor

Mmm... "BEST NAUGHTY SERVER @ BAD DATA CLUB"

Isn't that why sim owners still have 512m free tier?

*looks at island sim stats*

*looks at unsuspecting noob First Land sims*

*looks at darkness within his own soul*


Must. Not. Succumb. To. Temptation... must... not... must... not... aaaagghhh...

Resist the dark side, Desmond.

But it's so goooood, Phedre.

*pouts*

Ok, thanks. But I fail to understand why they need to be located in "physical proximity" of each other. Do they have to exist in the same SIM to work? Or is it just a question of convenience?

I saw a "datacenter", i.e. a bunch of SLExchange Magic Box(es) in the Airport, but they looked like they were all from different vendors, so I fail to see why they need to be put together, especially because a couple of my friends who sell on SLEx keep theirs in their own land/home... heck, I even hosted one for a landless friend for a bit, and it just worked.

In other words, I can't fathom why putting them together would be better than disperse them... RL datacenter have economies of scale for air conditioning, high speed connections, physical security... nothing of this really applies in SL.

Abbotts 72,187,25


There's a good 30+SLex boxes here, doesn't seem to lag to bad..

Hi Pamar,

No need to be in the same sim as anything to work as they typically communicate inworld by email.

For a single merchant having vendors together is obviously convenient for stocking and administering them.

I think the idea of using a sim specifically as a datacentre for multiple merchants is actually quite good from the point of view of containing the lag so they don't impact on a habitable sim however. Additionally, any in world server will benefit from a stable environment, maybe a controlled access sim that is less likely to have multiple avs, or physics enabled objects in it.

Would this work with the (in)famous "empty" sims? I understand that scripts perform poorly in those, but it's mostly anedoctal evidence, and considering, as you noted, that Abbot seems to run fine, maybe it could work.

Nah, not gonna work very well in void sims.

30 SLExchange boxes is still fairly light loading; if I recall correctly (I could be off) the msec time used by each of them is .05, and a sim starts to get in trouble at 23.00 or so. I know (some version of) JEVNs are about .05.

So 30 x .05 is 1.50 (ish) - that's about the same sort of script lag as just one fairly laggy item, or really roughly, about 7% of what the sim can do before it hits full scripting capacity and everything starts to slow down badly.

For complicated reasons, there is 'script lag' from more things than the sim stats show - for instance avatars add to it but don't show up in stats. Until they sit on a prim that is - then you can see what an avatar really does. Some clock in between 1.00 and 2.00 depending how much scripted stuff they have on them.

One fun experiment: sit an avatar on a prim, and then have the avatar fire some of the fancier scripted weapons. Then watch a private island's "top scripts" report. I've seen timeslice of 3.50 while shooting, easily - that's about 15% of what the ENTIRE sim can handle.

Point being: in the "average" sim, just typical stuff going on will easily take up half or more of a sim's scripting capacity. Let's say you are in a *really* light-loaded sim, and there's 10.00 msec of script time free. That's heaven when it comes to low lag, and quite rare. Presuming nothing else going on, 200 scripted prims at .05 will eat that right up.

So a single 1024m lot with data servers on it could soak up a 'fast' sim's entire script cycle reserve just idling there, and a 2048m lot full of them would lag that sim into LSL hell.


Anyway - so you see it really depends on the size of the 'data center'; a small one won't do much, but a modestly sized one - well, you don't want to share a sim with that if you can help it.

Personal experience with a major manufacturers Vendor servers. On Dragon Isle we were increadibly hard on ourselves to keep lag as low as possible. Prior to placing the servers I was running at a client side FPS of 100+. After the family placed their 38 servers my FPS dropped to 8.

We no longer used networked servers.

I disagree. Those boxes make it a royal pain in the ass to fly anything in Abbotts. They eat up a huge amount of script resources. I used to sell there and the sim owners were CONSTANTLY looking for what was causing the slowness. We were restricted in what kind of vendors we could have, encouraged to have totally unscripted vendors, etc. Nothing worked, and nothing will work, because there are tons of SLExchange boxes there, and they aren't going away.

When LL finally gives us Mono, maybe things will get a little better. For now, I almost never fly through Abbotts, because it's nearly as bad as the sandboxes. Moving around without a vehicle is fine, since scripts are throttled to keep them from interfering with physics speed, but when your aircraft has to fight tons of other scripts for a timeslice, the controls get very hard to manage.


Networked servers have absolutely no impact on client side FPS at all. To the client they are just more prims. It's server-side script execution resources that they are so hard on, particularly when you have a pile of them.

The best solution for a "data center" would be to buy a private island and do it there. (And whatever else the island is used for, it better not be sensitive to script execution speed, because that stuff will kill it.)

Just as an update, the datacenter has been created in a "budget" sim, right now there are 5 racks available for rentals but of course we can get more if needed, just contact me or Simon Lameth and we can take care of you

right now if you but 5 weeks you get 4 FREE! so yeah... i know this isn't really the right forum but since the subject was originaly about it i thought i would put it here

so check us out at: http://slurl.com/secondlife/sawrey/218/133/42/