Inside Second Life’s Data Centers

Bartholomew Gallacher 12. März 2007 0 Kommentare

Well, after I finished my roundup I’ve found an article from last week in my feedreader run by Infoweek called "Inside Second Life’s Datacenter." It showed up today at Slashdot, so… it should be already very popular now.

But there are some real interesting facts in this article I’d like to point out:

• the monthly growth rate is about 20% at the moment. That’s big!
• The maximum possible number of concurrent online users at the moment is claimed to be at 100.000 avatars. I don’t believe this number, they’ve got already issues when the number goes about 30.000 anytime at the moment, the grid destabilizes and becomes unreliable. But there’s reliability in this unreliability, since you just need to take a look at the online users count and the rule of thumb…
• Are you seated? Really? Better take a seat. Ok. Their goal is – no joke – to be able to support 10s of millions of simultaneous logins! Bwahaha! Sorry, better first fix the existing login count and make the system scale more well before planning such… high… numbers! *coughs*
• Second Life consists of around 2.000 servers at the moment running on Debian Linux with MySQL. Debian… of all of the systems. Arg. Right, that’s the linux distribution that constantly fails to deliver a new version at the planned timeline reliable (3 years was the worst delay ever, the now planned release of last December is still not there) and is there even more worse in this aspect than Microsoft can ever hope to be! No wonder so much are switching to Ubuntu. Besides, some of the packages are really outdated and some of their maintainers have real weird point of views. And MySQL – well, some still consider it still something of a toy database. It still needs to overcome that image and that’s why always so many recommend LL to switch to Postgresql.
• If the server side part is going to be opensourced or not is still in the discussion. Nothing new there. Many possibilities, not all include an opening of the source code.
• They’re looking for an IT guy who can help them scale their infrastructure from 2.000 servers up to 10.000 servers.
• They’re trying to make the LSL-implementation faster. That’s nothing new so far, too, that’s their Mono-Project. Testing of it should start in the second quarter 2007.
• Something new about LSL: it was written in one week back then, and the Mono-Project will enable to script in other languages like Visual Basic or C#.
• Some new measures under consideration to manage growth: limiting logins at the weekends and moving some of the Second Life experience to normal web servers (rubbish, this should be all in the client IMHO, this is Second Life, not Web 2.0), changes in the database infrastructure and the availability of tools that show you how much computing power your avatar needs, especially when it uses much attachments and such.

Some of it sounds nice, other things – 10s millions of concurrent logins – sound more like Science Fiction at the moment. 100.000 concurrent logins are supported at the moment? Well… yes, could be, but the SL experience then is going to be more like lag hell on earth I am afraid.

So the point is: they’re aware of the problems, trying to fix them and planning big things for the future, but hopefully they’re able to fix SL first.

Another roundup

Bartholomew Gallacher 12. März 2007 0 Kommentare

It’s been a while since my last blogging spree that I’ve posted any new article at all. So, without much foreword, some new thingies:

• Dedric Mauriac blogged about the in world building of Packaging and Converting Essentials. Seems he really likes the place.
• The picture that I made of the P&CE building is now used in their in world ad with permission. Nice. Perhaps I should start a career as photographer in Second Life. Then again my photo editing skills are surely not high enough, I am more a technician than anything else.
• A change of one of the last updates that not everybody has notices comes into effect now – you can spend maximum 999.999 L$ per classified now instead of 99.999 L$ before. This means the maximum went from something like 357 US$ up to 3571 US$ per week. And there are already ads in the system where the author of it plays around 200.000 L$ per week for it, that’s about 714 US-$ for the sum in real money. So these guys are either very wealthy or making much money in world already.
• Some days ago the Second Life Herald run an article about ageplay. While normal ageplay is nothing to say against it, there’s also sex ageplay in the game (child escorts/teen escorts), and this seems to has a market, too. Now how sick is this? It’s even against the law in many countries. Of course, the normal ageplayers are not against the law at all, but the growth rate is amazing: 1 % per week. This means exponential growth of course and is something that cannot go on forever.
• The next planned downtime this week brings us again no update of the primary client, while the First Look client got some of them already. Could be, that they need the whole timeslot, could be not. But they should finally take some time to fix the most annoying bugs in the main client, namely the inability at the moment to offer teleports to avatars who are not your friends and the annoying water-bug. Or they should finally setup a source repository and give some well accredited programmers from the community write-level access. Then it would have already been fixed since ages!
• Here’s another blog entry from a journalist of the Handelsblatt about SL in general. The essence of it is: Second Life is mostly an Empty Life, sex is the most driving force behind the in world economy, rw companies normally don’t blend in real well and it’s overhyped at great lengths. Period.
• And now for something completely different: wannabe terrorists planned to attack a very important Internet node in London. They were captured before they could act on their plan. This still shows us: without a first life there’s no second life and we should be thankful they were captured beforehand.

About Flumm Melendez, landbaron in the making

Bartholomew Gallacher 7. März 2007 0 Kommentare

I know Flumm Melendez since some time, comes from because she’s been an avid writer to the group „SL Deutschland“. The first time I saw her profile, Flumm Melendez was a female avatar, earning her money in world as an escort and with making and selling tattoos.

After some time, though, this became boring or whatever, so she started building her own club, I guess its name was „Ice cube“ or something like that. I was there back then and helped her testing a door for the nudie room.

Then after a short while the avatar turned into a male, also showing for some time a RL picture of the player behind it in the profile. 27 years old, male, from Berlin, Germany. Quite a change.

Now I’m hopping to a new sim, Berlin City, and guess who’s the landbaron there? Flumm Melendez, also most of it crowded with buildings and sold. Not far away from this sim is another new sim, Cologne City? Owner? Flumm Melendez. So – the real money in Second Life still is in selling and renting sims and building.

And to sum it up, there’s of course also a web presence about the real estate business of Flumm Melendez: Second Earth Sims.  And here’s a posting about the history of the avatar made by Flumm Melendez himself (Germany only).

If you ask me, quite an interesting career, but not too unusual in SL at all.

More math on the land business

Bartholomew Gallacher 6. März 2007 0 Kommentare

I’ve taken a look at the Land Auction page from Lindenlab today for closed auctions. Seems they’re adding eight new regions per day at the moment, most appear at the new continent in the east, I guess.

The average prize a new region is sold for is around 3.000 US$. Now 8 regions auctioned off per day makes 24.000 US$ income per day and for the tier-fees later 1.560 US$ safely per month. Not bad, he?

And all that for a dual CPU machine which can host two regions alone.

Well, and if you convert the price into land values and the owner wants to make some profit with the region, this means high land prices. Of course.

A region has 65.336 square meters. So, you can buy 270 L$ at the moment for 1 US-$. This means already that you need to take about 12 L$ per square meter only if you want to get this investment in. Now take the tier-fees into account, too, makes around 0.80 L$ per square meter in the first month. Let’s say if you want to sell the region without loss in the first month you need at least a prize from 13 L$ per square meter.

But many want to make big profits, so 13 L$ is not being seen so much on the regions, quite often you’re going to see higher prices. Well, that’s the reason still why land prices are high and not going down, soon, I suspect. Since it’s also LL main income source they’re going to milk the cow as long as its being possible and in the end we’re all paying the price for it. Well, all that want to own land on the mainland.

Well, and because of missing covenants at most mainland sims, the housing can be real terrible.

Island deliveries today – some math

Bartholomew Gallacher 6. März 2007 2 Kommentare

Well, seems the Lindens are clearing their backlog and delivering today (!) about 300 islands.

Let’s calculate a little. For normal users (non educational) reserving a region costs 1.675 US$ and the monthly maintenance fee for an island is 295 US$.

So alone on reserving costs 300 new arriving islands mean: 300 islands * 1.675 US$ = 502.500 US$ income for Lindenlabs. Of course not all of it profit, since they’re using these fees to pay the server hardware, plain and simple, but surely are still making some profit with it.

Then 300 islands * 295 US$ maintenance fee per month and per island = 88.500 US$ income on maintenance fees per month with these islands. Most are surely used to pay the staff and the location, but that’s where the real profit comes from for Lindenlab.

So – not bad, hu?

PC&E opened in world presence

Bartholomew Gallacher 5. März 2007 0 Kommentare

Packaging&Converting Essentials, a content provider for the graphics and packaging industry, has opened up its in world presence last week in the sim Sede de Marte.

The building is outstanding in regards of architecture; one of the few pentagons you’re ever going to see in world. They’re handing out RSS reader huds and of course you can get in touch with their staff, my good old friend Ludwig "Lu" Stapleton as communication officer. And yes, she’s a female avatar, just being very much in love with Ludwig van Beethoven, hence the name.

Ah and since everybody loves pictures, here’s a picture of the building taken by myself. The building itself was done by Alex Bader.

If you want to listen to nice music or inform yourself about matters of the graphical and packaging industry, just go there and get yourself informed.

Taxes on virtual economy

Bartholomew Gallacher 5. März 2007 0 Kommentare

CNNmoney.com ran an interesting article about „Second Life’s looming tax threat.“ What stays in world is in world and not interesting for the IRS. But when you’re trying to convert it into real money that’s quite a different matter.

It is about the possibility that you’ve got to pay income tax in the future to the IRS if you’re earning money in SL and other games like WoW and whether it’s possibile or science fiction. An interesting read.

New things in the making

Bartholomew Gallacher 1. März 2007 0 Kommentare

There’s been a somewhat quiter time now in Second Life, especially in terms of media coverage and company news, but now again the hype is heating on.

Here are some of those events:

• The Germans Samwer brothers achieved a 10% share of Anshe Chung Enterprises. For those who don’t know them: these are businessmen, who first founded a German competitor to eBay, called Alando and sold it then to eBay for around 50 million US$. Later they’ve founded Jamba, the German or European (?) market leader in ring tone sales, which became vastly popular for their annoying commercials. Many still remember the oh so annoying Sweety or perhaps the Crazy Frog. This is all of their doing. Well, their company got many critics back then because of their business behaviour, especially to underages. The most famous article about their behaviour is called „Jamba Kurs“ (English via Google) from the end of 2004 in the German blog Spreeblick and got them many bad media coverage, especially because the owner of Spreeblick found out that employees of Jamba posted disguised under some pseudonyms pro Jamba comments in his blog. This article made Spreeblick very popular, and it is still today one of the most read blogs in Germany. They’ve changed later there business practics under pressure of the government. Later they sold their company for about 270 million US$ to Rupert Murdoch and founded a risk capital company. Seems they’ve invested now with this company money into ACS like they also before did into the German Facebook copycat StudiVZ. This is, of course, a good deal, since they’ve got the advantage of very cheap and good workers from China. They intend to double the employee staff to 100 persons and to open several, international bureaus. This must be also a good deal for Ailin Gräf herself in terms of money, too. Both are very successful companies and business men.
• Second Life is in the process of getting voice capabilities. This is going to be a very big leap in the further development of the platform. The reactions about that are diverse; while some say that’s great, others say Lindenlabs should first fix the most outstanding bugs of Second Life before adding new features, that can possibly add even more to the lag situation we’ve got at the moment, others dislike it because it is somewhat disclosing about their real life persona and it can drive a somewhat rift in the playership between people still typing and people who only use voice only.
• Ah, and the lag, our friend, we all love and cherish: the Lindens claim it’s fixed. Consider that! Wow! What was the reason for it? A saturated network link. Now I wonder how often – if at all – they’re looking at their network router graphs. This is something so obvious to find out if you only take a closer look at your network equipment – sheesh. No fame for the Lindens there.
• CBS is financing the Electric Sheep Company. Another company getting an infusion of fresh money, this time the company that supports Open Second Life.
• Mercedes Benz has opened up an own point of business, that seems to be still somewhat lacking. Expect there more things to come, I guess it’s intentional they’ve opened up so early to get first some experiences in handling Second Life before the real shebang of the company starts.

About the economics of Second Life

Bartholomew Gallacher 27. Februar 2007 0 Kommentare

The Register ran a story one week ago about the economics of Second Life. They are taking a very close look at the hard facts of the economics in Second Life beside the hype. Some measures are really interesting and were even new to me.

First, there is the churn rate. Only about 15% of the people who create an avatar in October 2006 logged in again after their first 30 days in SL. Very interesting measure, indeed. This drastically reduces the number of real residents, of course. Even more when you take all alts out.

There are about 4 million residents at the moment, when you do the math, this means that there are really about 600.000 residents who login regularly (alts included in this measure).

They are also pointing out that the maximum number of avatars in one sim is around 100 at the moment; also a very important restriction on doing business in SL. But then again, the business in SL has found ways around it.

70% of the revenue of Lindenlabs is generated at the moment by land sales and tier fees. No surprise in there. It’s a bubble at the moment, bound to burst sooner or later. Of course, LL would like it to burst later to generate more profit out of it.

Last number is that there are around 50.000 premium users at the moment; that’s not really much for such a big game/platform/whatever.

It’s a nice article with some new insides beside the mainstream and definitely worth a read.

Germans and their Arbeitsamt

Bartholomew Gallacher 24. Februar 2007 0 Kommentare

There are many Germans in the game. Many of them are looking for a job. So, what would have been a better idea then to found something like a job agency for them? Yes, there is one, called SLArbeitsamt, the homepage is here.

Well, what is an Arbeitsamt? It is the job agency, founded by the government over there. But, it is already called since some years „Agentur für Arbeit“ (Agency for Work), so no more Arbeitsamt anymore.

Whatever, taking a look at this homepage can be quite amusing. Most people looking for work are really young, so to speak; they should first hone their skills, then get to work. Of course, there are the typical jobs like model or escort – but hey, everybody can look good in SL without doing much, so there are masses of them. No wonder about that, but actually there are not soo much vacancies for them as you may think when you read the press about it.

There are also different kind of jobs, too, like a RW company looking for someone to hire in RL, their are looking for event hosts, DJs, hosts, designers, builders and other stuff.

My opinion? If you really want to get a job, it’s perhaps a nice way to get one at the entry level. But that’s all you can expect from them. Better jobs are surely not going to be posted there, they are given away like in RL, too, by reference and the reputation you’ve got in SL.

And it’s always better to look for yourself for a job then taking the service from such kind of agency at all.