Monat: Oktober 2007

What’s next on Lindenlabs‘ agenda? Ban prostitution, of course!

If you take a look at the recent ban of gambling, you may wonder what’s coming up next to be banned or limited. If Lindenlab would be consistent with their intentions, one things really pops up mighty in my mind: prostitution.

Sex and, yes, prostitution, though most people prefer to call themself in an euphemistic kind of way escort and not prostitute, is one of the big driving motions behind Second Life at all. And, yes, like gambling it’s prohibited in many countries Second Life is available.

So if Lindenlab is really consistent about establishing a somewhat "cleaner" Second Life this must be next on their agenda: the containment or even shutting down of most prostitution happening in Second Life.

Either that, or as another consequence building up a new strictly, clean, separate corporation grid without this kind of business at all, like the Teen Grid is today. But then again, this would hurt their land sales, since it would depend on how many residents of course would like to visit this clean grid and you got more possible visitors on the main grid than on an own corporation grid. But for strict in house usage such a grid would be a heavy, good asset for Lindenlab to have.

This would of course hurt the in world economy great lengths since most of it is built upon sex, sex, sex, and many people come into Second Life to get laid and many females are working as escorts or dancers at least.

But it’s the next logical step in the development of Second Life at all. In my opinion the question is not if it is going to happen at all, but how and when it is going to happen. This is bound to happen sooner or later if Second Life should still appeal to big real world companies. A cleaner grid could mean better land sales to such companies and in the end it’s all that counts for Lindenlab. Sales, more sales, more and better income and profit to be alive.

Slowing down on the economy

When you take a look at the recent development of Second Life, then there are some things different compared to earlier developments:

  • There are still no key metrics available for August 2007. Those tend to get published later and later over the months.
  • The exchange of Linden dollars has reached a peak in the 1st quarter of 2007; since then it has been slowly decreasing, so Q1 is its peak (take a look at the last graph here).
  • Premium residents have reached their peak in June, there have already been less again in July.
  • The number of new residents entering the game has slowed down.
  • Business people are complaining in world about a lack of sales, meaning those are going down at the moment. There is for example being rumored that 70% of the Plush sims are unused right now.
  • Many Europeans are pissed off that they now have to pay VAT in most cases. This is not LL’s fault at all, but could lead to more in world payments again and/or higher prices on their products.
  • Many markets tend to be sated after a while, so it goes with many in world markets when the rush of newbies tends to be over.

So what does that mean? Well, for now the hype is over in most countries. If Second Life should prove its worth as a tool, it now needs to improve to appeal more for business usage and to be more stable to sustain the established in world economy and returning residents.

Premium residents are not enough in numbers to sustain SL at all, so most of the money Lindenlab makes has its origin in land sales and main land tier fees. The borders of growth have been reached for now, as it seems, so now it’s time for a consolidation of Second Life at all.

Since all are dependent on Lindenlab, this means of course more stable sims and clients, which is on the way according to them, a better scalable grid, too, better customer service – face it, most think it’s as bad as it can be and slow, slow, slow – and getting more in touch again with the community.

For many residents the relationship with Lindenlab is kind of love/hate. Love, that they made Second Life possible and hate, because of the high land prices, not stabilizing the client/server enough, being dependent on Lindenlab, slow customer service and many more of such things. Oh, and since you can’t see the Lindens in world often anymore, they became something like the spooky people running all of the stuff in the background.

Also the main focus of Lindenlab shifted from promoting Second Life to promoting the technic behind it, the grid. This is perhaps a good move for them, but of course also means that they’re now focusing more on the technic behind it than on the well established community in Second Life.

About megaprims

The official Second Life blog has today an entry about so called megaprims (greater than 10m at one side at least). Megaprims where never intended to be, but they happened some while ago and they are in use in different buildings, you can either get them just so or buy them at stores.

They are rumored to have a negative impact on the physics engine and to cause lags and such, but none the less many builders have adopted them very fast and used them in their buildings.

So there’s a discussion about it they should stay or not; at the moment they are only tolerated by Lindenlab, but they don’t really like them.

So what’s the sensible approach? Are they needed or not? I guess they are needed, because they fit into a gap. I mean, why would you use for example 9 prims (10x10m) to make a floor that’s 30x30m wide when you just can use one prim? Because they are needed, they’ve been used and there’s a market around it.

But of course too big megaprims are not right, so they should not be bigger than a whole sim, meaning 256x256x256m. In those parameters they could really enrich the building experience.

10 million residents reached!

The statistical mark of 10 million residents in Second Life has been reached today. No big fanfare nor press message at all, this shows the shift from promoting Second Life to promoting the grid. Heck, the number of residents isn’t even been shown on the first page of the website anymore for quite some weeks.

On ext3, MySQL and the impact it has on Second Life

All the big databases of Second Life are using MySQL. Lindenlab runs them on the premise: databases are ordinary, better run 50 of them than just to have a big one. Choosing and running a database engine is one thing, the other how you install it.

A big matter of choice and on the impact on the whole data system is of course the operating system – Lindenlab runs Linux – and of the underlying file system. According to the SL history wiki all the database servers of Lindenlabs use ext3 as default filesystem, after they uses ReiserFS 3 for a while and evaluated XFS. Ext3 is really a bad choice if you need the best performance your hardware can give.

Well, why that? There are some reasons. There’s this interesting IRC log of MySQL employee Kristian Köhntopp. Köhntopp is quite well known for his articles about computer topics and such. This IRC log is about which file system you should choose for a database server in general, but you can take his views of course too on the databases empowering Second Life.

Well, so what’s wrong with ext3 as filesystem for a database server according to Mr. Köhntopp and what’s ok about it? Several things:

  • the amount of files in a directory doesn’t really matter anymore with ext3 compared to filesystems like XFS when you’ve created the ext3-filesystem with the option dir_index.
  • A big disadvantage is that ext3 is flushing its log quite irregularly. Meaning: the execution times of certain queries in MySQL can differ quite a lot.
  • Another disadvantage is that ext3 does not perform very well if many concurrent clients are connecting read/write, in numbers from 10-50. If only running a single thread, ext3 is mostly expected to be faster than XFS. But when running with many concurrent clients – and that’s what we got sure in Second Life – XFS beats ext3 hands down.
  • XFS has in contrast to ext3 way much better flush times, they are more regular, and it’s much better at preventing the fragmentation of files.
  • Ext3 is making "block marmelade", meaning inter chained files, if some files in the same directory are growing at the same time; XFS is good at preventing such a thing.

In conclusion Köhntopp states that ext2 (which is the base of ext3) is depending on the state of art around 1984. XFS on the contrary has been build on papers around 1994, meaning it’s younger and having a bigger code base. This means, that XFS might have more errors still than ext3 but on features that ext3 doesn’t have.

Oh, and by the way, according to this blog entry from 2005 about the switch back to ext3 from Mark Linden he hasn’t really understand what a journaling file system is for. If you take a look at the 2nd mail on this link, you see what Theodore T’so means. But keeping the data intact is not for what the journaling file system has been made. It has been made to keep the filesystem itself intact.

If you want to have an intact database after a crash, use an ACID-compliant one, like the InnoDB-Engine of MySQL.

So what’s to say in conclusion? If Lindenlab is still using only ext3 as filesystem for all of their database servers and those servers normally have many concurrent read/write clients around 10-50 or more, they’re denying themself from the speed a decent filesystem could give them and really, really should consider moving to another filesystem like XFS. This would be also one good explanation why e.g. the asset server is so damn slow – always, because the filesystem is slow.