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Class 5 sims -- what's the deal?
Ricky Zamboni
Private citizen
Join date: 4 Jun 2004
Posts: 1,080
11-03-2006 20:46
Ian Linden: (http://blog.secondlife.com/2006/10/16/looking-forward-to-class-5/ )

"From a resident perspective, the key difference is that the new machines should offer higher, more consistent sim-side performance for heavily-loaded regions, especially when there are a large number of scripts running. LSL performance should be quite a bit higher, although we won’t know by exactly how much until Class 5 has been running in production for a while."

Fritz Linden: (http://blog.secondlife.com/2006/11/03/updated-information-about-private-regions/ )

"Honestly, we hate this question. The reason we hate it is that there is no data to support the idea that Class 5 hardware is going to work any better than the Class 4. The differences between the types of hardware aren’t very large, and the reason for the change is something that probably won’t have any noticeable effect from the resident perspective."

So, which is it? Will class 5 sims "offer higher, more consistent sim-side performance for heavily-loaded regions", or is there "no data to support the idea that Class 5 hardware is going to work any better than the Class 4"?
Kelly Linden
Linden Developer
Join date: 29 Mar 2004
Posts: 896
11-03-2006 21:22
I think the key is this:
"although we won’t know by exactly how much until Class 5 has been running in production for a while."

Ian is optimistic about improved performance, Fritz is pessimistic. Our primary reason for the new systems was not performance, but rather power consumption and cooling needs. While we can sit and stare at CPU and system specifications until our eyes bleed the truth is that we will not know until we get some extended real world usage on the new hardware.
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- Kelly Linden