Avatarian News 4
by Taras Balderdash
February 16, 2007 |
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Avatarian News
This is a brief issue of the Avatarian News, and more technical than spiritual, but please bear with me.
I am troubled by Second Life's technical limitations. As you have no doubt noticed, when there are 25,000 people logged in, the place turns into a lagging, dragging nightmare. I usually leave at that point to let some of the newer people get a chance to explore. If enough experienced people step out when they see telltale lag, the numbers will drop below 25K and more or less normal performance will be restored.
So the numbers of people logging in is driving Linden Lab's database beyond its capacity.
For a long time I've held that the database is the problem. If they move to a commercial, enterprise RDBMS (that's the full geeky acronym for database, since formally speaking, the database is merely the raw material, and the RDBMS is the instrument that makes use of that material). But even a major-league, high-priced full featured enterprise RDBMS can support 100s of thousands of sessions, but not 100s of millions. The future of the virtual world is massively parallel access, with most of the world in contact through this medium at any given time, like the Web.
So moving to Oracle, DB2, etc. would help a lot, short term, but will not be enough, ultimately.
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The conclusion I've reached, which I think is shared by Linden Labs, judging from several announcements over the last couple of months, is that they need to move the whole world to Open Source and allow people to create their own sims (a simulator, sim for short, is a one-CPU unit of reality here, 64 K square meters of territory). Once people create their own sims, and keep their inventory, etc. on their own resources, Linden Labs will function as an intermediary, connecting these worlds in our common area of Second Life. There are many technical challenges to this. After all, how does this world handle displaying inventory that in fact is stored on another computer? What are the security implications of this? etc., etc.
But moving to a true grid, a set of computers and storage devices belonging to organizations all over the world, will make Second Life more like the Internet. Parts of it may crash, but not all of it. Parts of it will be slow, parts fast, depending on the underlying hardware.
That is my only thought for the moment, since the world, as it is now, is not likely to survive for long. The truly creative people, the content creators who bring us wonderous scripts and places of marvel and beauty, are leaving, one by one, unable to work their magic.
But ultimately I think Linden Lab, or a company like them, will create a truly scalable world which will gradually become integrated into the big world, blurring the lines between the two realities. I am optimistic, because this is the next 'big thing', if the humans can resist the urge to
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;)