Jahr: 2007

Scaling Second Life

In the Avastar #14 there’s a comment of Gwyneth Llewelyn about the scaling of Second Life on page 6. She’s claming that one possible move to relieve the grid of stress would be to store the texture data, which seems to go into the hundred of Terabytes (wonder where she got this number from, I thought all data is around 34 terabytes at the moment according to this article, so I stuck with this number, so hundred of terabytes is wrong on a great scale), from outside the grid, perhaps even allowing users to store them on their own servers. While I don’t see the textures stored on the own servers, because of possible protests, she continues.

She’s stating that if that move occurs the 2000 servers of SL would be able to hold 20 million simultaneous users and this could be achieved within a month with the work of one developer!

Personally, I doubt that – really. I know they’re going to switch from their own data protocol to HTTP somewhat this year. Serving a texture is a quite simple task – provided it’s stored in a simple filesystem and not in a database. Storing textures – binary data – in a database system is always very dumb; the clever way to do it is to store the filesystem name in the database only, since the database is much, much slower to the task and adds far more complicity to it.

And, of course, the textures and so on are really not stored on one hard disk, but I guess on a logical volume or clustered filesystem. There are enough technics around to do it under Linux.

I personally think that serving the textures is not what strains the servers, because they’re loaded into the cache and that’s it, then. It’s more computing the viewing range, making database querys about the prims (if stored in database) with their textures, it is interpreting scripts, computing the locations of all the avatars, doing the physics stuff and so on. And that’s why I think even if the textures are located somewhere else that the technic now available on the main grid is not up to the task to handle 20 million users at the same time

From PDF to Second Life

Over at Sleeds.org is an interesting movie how they made a building, the process started with PDF, exporting it with Adobe Illustrator into SVG, this was processed by a script to get LSL snippets posted into a notecard and then got finally rezzed in SL.

This looks much like e.g. blender to prim, but it’s impressive, none the less, though I guess if you really want to build good things you need so stuck up with the client. Period.

Griefers at Mercedes-Benz Island

A few days ago I visited Mercedes-Benz Island to take another look at their in world presence. Well, there was not much happening, anyway and there was also no employee of the company present at this time. They are around there, normally, at some time.

They’ve got not very tight settings on security there, either. This means – just pushing is forbidden, all else works – user scripts, flying around and placing objects is available for every visitor. This means: very bad settings in concerns of security and an open invitation to griefers. I guess, autoreturn is in action, though, but placing objects allows the use of weapons.

And guess what? There were some bored griefers, who came into the island and wrecked havoc upon it. They were somewhat harmless, though, since they did not cage or orbit people. This would have been possible for them, too, without big effort at all.

So, how do bored people or griefers look like? Well, like the gentlemen on the picture down below, for example. Click the thumbnail to get the bigger view.

Well, and how does it look like, when they’re doing there hobby? For example like on the picture down below; David Hasselhoff spreaded all over the place. They also nuked virtual bombs all over the place, used weapons to bring avatars to them and made other stuff. Unfortunately there was no one of Mercedes-Benz around nor the info how to contact one of them. Well, it lasted a few minutes, then they left.

When I asked one of those, if he’s bored, he just told me: "This game is shit." Riiight… then just leave it and go away playing Scrabble!

When you’re online for quite a time, you’re going to develop a feeling for those bunch of guys when they’re around; they always mean trouble and just want to get attention. In a way they’re like spammers; ruining the whole thing if you’re not doing something against them.