This will never scale

It's about 5-6 days now that playing Second Life had been so a painful experience that tonight, I give up. Tried to build, gave up because too much lag. Tried to shop for some textures, gave up because once tp'd, nothing rezes. Walls not rezing, floor not rezing, objects appear so slowly that I have to wait for hours. Textures not rezzing, hovering the mouse one by one, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting... Walking into the ground because lag. Choppy flying. Everything plagued with lag. The fun is out now.

5-6 days?
I have been here for 3 years and i still don't think i see the big picture.
You might need to wait some more.

Although following his post is difficult I think he means In the last 5-6 days things have gotten much worse.

He looks to have been here more like 5 months.


Personally -

I dont think SL performance was ever all that great (2 years for me)

Though textures did seem to rez better/ quicker before 1.7

I havent noticed a decline in performance in the 2 years other than that, really.

I have noticed an increase in lag and packet loss, but nothing that I can't live with. Mileage varies according to computer specs, preference settings and house cleaning (inventory, disk frag, etc.) I do everything I can to optimize my settings and so far it's helped keep my SL experience quite enjoyable.

A lot of this depends on where you hang out.

If you hang out in places that becoem laggier you will notice more lag.

Though Lag and packet loss have always been there.

Lol Anyone remember May/June? of 05 when we all had to be be naked or be grey?

FOR DAYS.

Thinking on it , I dont remember as much running into issues at Peak Times as we do now. Course the online population was far smaller.

It seems now at 30k residents online is a definite performance loss in TP/ Inventory / Etc.

but when its below that seems as fast/slow as ever.

I do!

I also remember when 5000 users on at once would crush the grid.

I won't get into the whole better or worse debate, since I honestly think both sides of the argument have merit.

2.5 petabytes of information (last I heard) in a MySQL database. That's enough I need to know in order to understand the problems of scalability in SL. Yeeeeeeee.

Kam

Over the past week, I have had Zero lag issues, but I spend alot of my time on Private sims so I dont thing im subject to those problems

I remember the pile ons for 5000 on the beta grid! The Benshee Rezzer we got from that! Lost count of how many times the sims involved went down, but the lag... oh, it was horrible!

How can they be scaling when they keep adding users? up 10 down 20.........-10 hence MAYBE the coders are smart enough to pull this off.......But why not just hardware instead of scaling? CHEAP!

You are correct. This is a fairly short amount of time, but enough to get some insight of a trend. I take an eye on # of online users. When I wrote this post, we were 35000. I move a lot inside SL, from Mainland to various private islands. Everywhere, I get the slow-to-non rezing world problem, no walls, no floor for a minute. Tp'd in seemingly desert areas. Unable to find an item in malls since I would have to wait half an hour in each to rez textures, just to discover the item is not here and tp to the next mall. Tp'ing in my wall-less home for a minute or so, asking myself if I had derez something by mistake, and what was there yesterday or an hour ago. Tp'ing in floor-less areas, asking "hey, did they finished this build or no, it was supposed to be finished yesterday".

I have some tests. One of them is going to Balac and flying around the bridge. Balac is empty almost anytime, the bridge makes a perfect reference for testing flight accuracy. While I could have excellent performances, frame rate (and fun) monthes ago, I'm now unable to control my fly. I have 4 clients: the main one and three versions of FirstLook. The machine is the same, the internet link is the same, I empty the cache before each test.

Add to this slow inventory object entries (will it rez or not, should I rez another one taking the risk to end with two of them, three, four?), slow group selection (excuse me Jane, I have to wait for my group to activate before rezing, I suggest we take a break), authorization errors (not enough privileges to read this notecard, sorry, try later). And yes, yesterday I gave up, being unable to do anything creative except sitting and chatting, oh no forget chatting with a 15s delay between questions and answers.

I knwo this may be network and location dependant. I'm in Europe, have to cross the seas with huge packet losses, but that has been the case for 5 monthes. Maybe SL will cope with 35000 users but what next? 40000, and the same pain for us until it can cope decently with 40000 then what next? 45000 and still the pain. Talk about a paying guinea pig in a lab. With no fun.

Jeff, I feel your pain. I think we all have to cope with very similar problems. The one thing LL does not make crystal clear, is that you really do need a top notch graphics card and plenty of RAM and a fast processor to try to enjoy this game/platform. I've upgraded all of those over the last 1.5 years and I've noticed a huge improvement. I still have to deal with the problems but it's much better now. FWIW. I hope it gets better for you.

If you have First Look viewers, then you're probably current on the Linden blog news. And although it's not headlined every single day, there have been numerous posts describing the ways in which LL is working to scale SL.

So yes, it's painful for some residents right now. And if you have a marginal system, it will probably always remain that way. But there is every reason to hope that SL can accommodate the growing population.

True. Wow I've almost been here as long as you.

Hopefully true. And this is not the time to bail on SL. Cory talked at great length during his last technical townhall about this - Many of the communication/architectural improvements are slated to roll in slowly throughout the year 2007. It isn't going to be the case that one particular Wednesday, after the update, everything's going to suddenly be wonderful. It will be gradual, with one step paving the way for the next, until it's all in, debugged and glued together.

In any case, Beebo's point about having a fairly high end system, particurly on the graphics end, is a critical one.

zk

If you are constantly moving from one sim to another, one mall to another, your cache and your RAM is going to fill up fast!

How much RAM have you got on your machine?

Malls are ALWAYS horrible. Too many textures with all of the different images to load (custom images at that) and then there are all of the "buy " scripts in the ad posters which are all running and taking down your performance.

I see the next killer add-on for SL will be a "proxy cache" program.

This would allow you to cache everything using either a older slower computer or on a second hard drive on a dual core computer.

I am guessing that most SL users already have older unused computers or can obtain hard drives for such a system. I see 400GB hard drives at the stores and they continue to get larger.

Some groups of users could even set up multiple clients to use one "Proxy cache". This would reduce load on SL even more.

The Open LibSL project group has the ability to make such a program, but with the protocols changing it is difficult to get such a project going.