Autor: Bartholomew Gallacher

Scaling issues – again

Second Life is growing again, which is a good thing. The concurrency level of logged in users is reaching new heights, so no one really knows why at the moment, and if it is going on like this we are going to have around 70K users logged in in two or three weeks. Nice.

What’s bad about is, is that the underlying architecture of the grid is still the same and while it’s been able to handle the normal loads now, it yesterday started to stutter badly, again. This hasn’t happened in such drastic manner for quite some time, now. I guess it’s really time that the new architecture, which is designed to scale more nicely, should be implemented and rolled out as soon as possible.

Some new stuff and such

Well, what’s new anyway in the meantime in SL? 

  • Mono has been deployed to the whole grid. This means, that all LSL scripts now might run on this new engine, which makes computation of scripts up to 200 times faster than the former one. As a side effect, every script has now 64 KB of memory for data instead of 16 KB. But it seems that if you want to run Mono, you have to recompile the script for yourself. Old scripts are not going to be recompiled automatically, a thing, that perhaps might happen in the future, though, since it’s for sure not going to happen that both engines are going to be supported parallel for long, meaning the old LSL engine is going to fade out slowly. If you want to compile your scripts on Mono, you need a viewer of the 1.21-series at least. 
  • The Lindens have a new communication policy for their blog, it is undergoing a big relaunch at the moment in the background. While some are happy, that now Torley Linden cannot put up his "pink-green neon glowing junk of happiness" on the homepage anymore, others wonder what happened there in general. They are planning to change their ways of communication, again, well so far we have to see what is going to happen in October. For the meantime we have to live with it like it is.
  • People are wondering which kind of product SLim is going to be and when it is going to be launched. So far, there are only rumors around despite the fact that Linden Lab recently applied for that trademark. Most agree, though, according to the application it is going to be some kind of messenger. This is exciting, because a new product is really something that might come in handy for Linden Lab to stand out against the less complex competition for an audience, for which Second Life is too complex, power hungry, whatever, in general not appealing enough. A first preview is expected though within the next couple of weeks. Makes me wonder… is this a project which has been initiated by Mark Kingdon aka M Linden or did the foundation for it already happen under Philip Rosedale’s reign as CEO still?
  • The next big thing in the background might be the standarization of the protocol to build the intergrid, the thing at which they are working together with IBM.
  • Copybot is supposed to get support for cloning prim attachments of avatars. I wonder, if this is ever going to really happen.
  • Land prices still stay quite low. This is bad for land barons, who need to make money on sales, but good for the inhabitants and other content creators, too.
  • Oldtimer Gwyneth Llwellyn ran an essay named "No more limits", outlining some ways in which Second Life might develop in the future, for example more prims per sim (again), bigger or smaller sims than 256×256 meters, allowance of megaprims and getting rid of the limitations of LSL. Some of those might really happen sooner or later in the future.

Some things die hard… or not at all

The old fashioned votebox made by Alberto Linden

Some things in Second Life just die hard or not at all, even if they don’t serve any purpose anymore. For example, this vote box to the left was in former days quite a common sight in Second Life.

It is a scripted device, made by Alberto Linden, and consists of 13 prims. It was used in times before traffic (aka as dwell) was invented to measure the popularity of a parcel. People just voted for it, all boxes where polled once a day and that’s how they got their measures in former times. Parcel owners got some stipends out of it, if it was a popular place (or something/somehow like that). You could just take of a station standing somewhere a copy, so it was really easy to get one.

At least it had a task its existence. But when traffic was introduced, the old mechanism of getting traffic was disabled. So those voting stations don’t serve any real purpose anymore, besided doing some nice sound effects when you touch them and eating away your prims.

Newbies still tend to believe those stations are useful; they are wrong. There are, though, some newer objects around, which mimic the design and look of the old station to a certain degree, but just act as counters, telling the owner which avatar voted for them at which time and date and that’s it, then. But since old habits die hard I expect to see them still for quite long on the grid in many clubs, belonging to owners, which don’t know better or are fond of them.

Copybot protectors

There’s still nothing more content creators in Second Life are fearing than the well known copybot. So still many vendors are using protection mechanisms, that worked with former versions of copybot by telling "!quit" in open chat, but those are not working anymore since aeons. 

But still many vendors don’t seem to know or want to know and are getting on the nerves of their customers with that unnecessary noise…

Some new developments

There’ve been some new developments in SL lately which are worth mentioning:

  • IBM tested a transport of an avatar from the Second Life grid to their own grid, meaning it is now technically possible to teleport to an Opensim. Sounds quite good, but at the moment it’s just moving an ruthed Avatar, since assets are not shared at all between those and are unlikely to be ever shared at all. Otherwise expect a revolt of content builders in Second Life, but we’re getting closer to the Intergrid.
  • Second Life is growing bigger and bigger. This is of course good for the company and stabilizes their economic model. There’s been a shift from premium users to land sales. If you don’t really want to own land on the mainland (and who does that really…) has no need to get a premium account at all! Seems also that in world economy is now recovering slowly of the gambling ban. Well, the prices for many stuff are quite high now, higher than they used to be in about one year for example, looking good in Second Life becomes more and more expensive…

And also something funny I’ve found in another blog: "Entering chat range: Prokofy Neva." Quite a funny chat transcript about how to call things in Second Life and more…