Second Life Looks At Scaling Problems 68
News.com reports that Second Life is looking down the barrel of some major scaling problems as the virtual world's popularity soars. While Linden Labs itself seems confident in the scalabilty of their virtuality, outsiders aren't so sure. From the article: "'My understanding of (Linden Lab's) back-end requirements are that they're absurd and unsustainable,' said Daniel James, CEO of Three Rings, publisher of the online game Puzzle Pirates. 'They have (about) as many peak simultaneous players as we do, and we're doing it on four CPUs.'"
Is this a point of failure? (Score:2, Interesting)
FTA: Each server is responsible for an individual "sim," or 16 acres of virtual "Second Life" land. At peak usage that means that each server is handling about three users."
That sounds like a point of failure. What would happen if a large group of mischievous users organize and decide to visit the same 16 acres of land simultaneously?
Re:Is this a point of failure? (Score:3, Funny)
Clearly, emulation is the answer.
Re:Is this a point of failure? (Score:2)
In warcraft, attacks on major cities have been known to bring the server down.
Does second life seperate its users? In warcraft, the player base is seperated across realms that dont interact with each other. When a realm goes down, other are not affected. (except a server will host a few realms, so a server can affect a few realms but not everyone). but its the entire realm that suffers. you have no exscape.
It looks like
Re:Is this a point of failure? (Score:2)
The sad thing is the new realms have a rush of people trying to avoid there wait times and create wait times on those servers.
So what is the limit on a sim? would they place more popular sims on better hardware to raise the cap?
Re:Is this a point of failure? (Score:1)
Re:It limits the number of users to ~50 (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:It limits the number of users to ~50 (Score:2)
Re:Is this a point of failure? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Is this a point of failure? (Score:2)
Their "3 players per server" was thrown out as a contrast to every other online game that has hundreds~thousands of users per server.
The question: If your user population explodes, how are you going to afford all the servers necessary to keep such a low player:server ratio?
The answer: Our servers are cheap and quickly/easily deployed. Don't worry about it, we're fine.
And Linden Lab claims they'll be profitable soon.
Not a hypothetical question (Score:5, Insightful)
Never mind mischevious users. A more important question is this:
What would happen a large group of normal users decide to visit the same 16 acres of land for reasons having nothing to do with mischief or organization?
As it happens, we see the answer to this question every single night. For example, there's somewhere in the world that's like the linden town square or something. It's your default "warp home" point after you first sign up for an account. This invariably has maybe ten to a hundred people in the area. You ask, what if a large group of people decide to all warp here at once--? Well, since it's the default warp point, they invariably will--?
And the answer to the question is "the game becomes unusably slow for anyone foolish enough to have entered this area". The way Linden Labs is dealing with this? They, uh. They split the town square area into four chunks such that the very center of the square rests directly on the boundary of four different acre servers. Which helps the slowdown there a little, but what about other situations where a large group of non-mischevious users may decide for totally natural reasons to all go to the same place at the same time-- say because there is an event or a party? This is a social game. The entire point of the game is to accumulate many players in one place at a time.
And as it stands, the [non]scalability is the game's worst problem. You basically never get even remotely acceptable framerates unless you're standing in one of the sandboxes by yourself or with maybe one other person.
Re:Not a hypothetical question (Score:2)
-Eric
Re:Is this a point of failure? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Is this a point of failure? (Score:2)
Re:Is this a point of failure? (Score:2)
That's not to say that it doesn't have problems. More than a bunch of people standing around, the bigger problems come with complex scripted objects dragging down the sim. You may only have 6 people on that particular server, but there still easily be 4000 scripts running in all the different objects laying around.
Not to mention that the clientside stuff can get pretty bad too. S
Edward Castronova? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Edward Castronova? (Score:2)
Article author not very clued (Score:3, Insightful)
Er, no, that's not really very unusual at all, for MMOs, and dates way, way back. (Well, as much as anything in MMOs goes "way back...")
It has a number of advantages and disadvantages over other architectures; it's generally thought to be more complex in terms of synchronization w/ "neighboring" servers, for instance, but this isn't something that would make someone who knows what he's doing go "WTF?" It certainly doesn't have inherent scaling problems.
I think this is representative of the author's tech clue.
--
Carnage Blender [carnageblender.com]: Meet interesting people. Kill them.
Re:Article author not very clued (Score:2)
Of course, there wouldn't be the traditional money involved, but that didn't stop other web projects.
Distributed SL (Score:1)
Many people have often tried to hack web stuff into doing shared 3D. For example, the Open Source Metaverse Project [sf.net] uses an SQL database to store stuff and web servers to serve it.
It really doesn't make a ton of sense once you start trying to do it, other than the fact that web technology is already deployed. Just getting the initial data to people is not hard. Its how to implement changes, interaction, etc.
SL is build both technically and socially on the idea of real estate. The scalability of that
Re:Article author not very clued (Score:2)
Ambitious indeed! (Score:2)
That's quite the bet there, speedy. Is it at least a real quarter that symbolizes a real bet or is it actually just a symbol of a quarter? Aaand, who gets the quarter?
Re:Ambitious indeed! (Score:2)
I think there's enormous potential for something like Second Life (essentially consider an http replacement/extension that treats "web pages" as locations and allows you to interact with other people in those locations -- 2d/3d doesn't matter), but Second Life isn't it.
Re:Ambitious indeed! (Score:1)
Re:Ambitious indeed! (Score:2)
Ah, there's the trick folks. It's a negative number.
-Eric
With all due respect... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:With all due respect... (Score:2)
Something is said to be scalable if it is relatively simple to make it able to handle larger loads. By all of the available evidence, Second Life does not seem to be very scalable.
Re:With all due respect... (Score:2)
A lot of the content in SL is scripted. I've even seen scripted shoes and scripted hair. Most servers have hundreds of scripts running, some thousands. As you might imagine, those scripts consume a lot of resources, along with all the other things the servers have to manage (e.g., havok physics, handling asset requests, communications, etc).
Re:With all due respect... (Score:2)
The point is, the fact that it is more complicated may prevent it from ever becoming a large scale success.
Makes Sense (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Makes Sense (Score:2)
The game would have been much better if it gave you an off-line sandbox where you could do your design and then move back online when you were done with your object.
Re:Makes Sense (Score:1)
I have also noticed that scripts are precompiled to some extent (likely into some sort of byte code) so the servers at least aren't having to burn time parsing every time the script is used. Though I do wonder if they do this compiling on the server side or the client. If they do it server side I would think there would be some improvements if they decided to use the client to compile the code and just send the script's text and byte code over the wire.
Re:Makes Sense (Score:2)
I would also think that by assigning servers to an area if the objects in the area have bugs (naaah, never could happen) it would only disable that parcel of land.
Now if the SL Linux client would actually work I'd be happy.
Surprised this is news... (Score:2)
Bruce
Re:Surprised this is news... (Score:1)
Re:Surprised this is news... (Score:2)
Re:Surprised this is news... (Score:2)
You can tell it's a sim (Score:1)
Land acreage is roughly 37.3 billion acres...
That comes to an average population of 2.85 people per 16-acres.
So... 3 people per 16 acres should be the *average* load. In this scenario, I'd guestimate that max would be closer to 50-100x the average if you take into account high population density apartment buildings, etc.
Even if we consider that they aren't simulating apartment buildings, though... my low-population density neighborhood has well over 3 people
Re:You can tell it's a sim (Score:2)
My assumption is that the 3 people per 16-acres (1 server) is an average. And that in highly populated areas, more powerful servers or arrays (ie: infrastructures) are dedicated to the 16-acre block. On the fringes of the virtual world where population is vastly lower, a bottom end server may host a single person in the 16-acre block.
No
In the real world, the average is 3 people/18 acre (Score:2)
By contrast, New York City has about forty people per acre.
Of course, that's just land area. If you include water area, both those numbers would be lower.
Land area:
World: http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0001763.html [infoplease.com]
NYC: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City [wikipedia.org]
stupid comparison (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:stupid comparison (Score:1)
http://thefloggingwillcontinue.com/?p=9 [thefloggin...ntinue.com]
They are much more subtle than the quote would indicate. Yay, journalism!
The big difference with SL (Score:3, Interesting)
LSL (the name of the scripting language) is interpretted, and oriented towards simplicity, not speed. It's goal is to make it relatively easy for users to create richly interactive and complex objects, at the cost of server CPU.
So yes, per Avatar, I am sure SL uses more server CPU than any other massively multiplayer game, but that's because it offers an extremely rich and customizable experience.
Re:The big difference with SL (Score:2)
Re:The big difference with SL (Score:2)
-Eric
It scales *financially* (Score:1, Interesting)
a) They charge users per acre of virtual world that they 'own'. The article claims that the monthly income from 16 acres is $200 - which is gonna pay for a cheap bare-bones server in just a few months. As their user base goes up - so does their income - and so they buy more servers.
b) Remember that user scripts continue to run even when there is nobody inside the 16 acre patch to see it happen. There was a
Re:It scales *financially* (Score:2)
Actually, the price of the server itself is already covered up front. New server regions which are added to the grid are first auctioned off for >=US$1000 (usually to the land resellers).
There is a one-time cost to initially procuring the land you want. If you leave or move, you can recover this cost by selling the land. The monthly fee (from $5 for 1/8th acre up to
Re:It scales *financially* (Score:2)
Yeah, assuming that everyone in SL buys a $200 a month island of their own. But of the hundreds of thousands of SL users there are, what, less than 100 islands? Many, if not most, aren't paying ANYTHING per month, but are still eating CPU cycles and bandwidth.
-Eric
SL looks like crap (Score:2)
Not to add SL really missed the last few advancements in 3D technology and looks like a bunch of polygonal edgy constructions with blurry textures on it.
I don't know why or how, but their whole site and promotional material looks like created by wannabe's (player content again?).
Their idea is great, but they should really jump into 21-
Is it really that scalable? (Score:1)
How are they going to power and cool all of those CPUs?
If SL currently runs on nearly 2600 machines, and each of those consumes a meager 200 watts, you would need about 520kW to power them.
The power needed to cool the machines is even greater.
How much power and cooling capacity does their data center have? What will they do when the run out?
Moores law (Score:3, Interesting)
Phrasing problem (Score:2)
Very very badly written (Score:2)
First, each virtual island is run on each server, aka a sim. All the users that are in the sim are handled by that sim's server. We've run over 100 users per sim in a conference setting, more by splitting the area over four sims, without too much delay. It's not like all "three people per sim" are spread out, they're may be some sims that don't have anyone in there and can be powered down a bit.
Each user's assets (how the person looks, any attachments to make him/her look frea