Second Life Looks At Scaling Problems

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.'"

Article author not very clued

[jbellis]

[uses] an unusual configuration that dedicates each server to a sliver of virtual real estate

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.

(x86 is the processor architecture used by most AMD and Intel chips)

I think this is representative of the author's tech clue.

--
Carnage Blender [carnageblender.com]: Meet interesting people. Kill them.

With all due respect...

[wbren]

They have (about) as many peak simultaneous players as we do, and we're doing it on four CPUs.

With all due respect to Daniel James, Second Life is much more complex than Puzzle Pirates. The peak usage numbers aren't the only factor in scalability.

Makes Sense

[BigCheese]

Since Second Life allows users to create objects for the game world I would expect them to have a lot more CPU dedicated to running it. Since the user content is interpreted (I assume) then you need a lot of horsepower to allow sims to interact with those objects.

Not a hypothetical question

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

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.

stupid comparison

[zyte]

comparing the number of servers it takes to run puzzle pirates and the number of servers it takes to run second life is unbelievably stupid. I'm just going to mention a few main points on how this is ridiculous but I'm sure there are more. Player Created Content. In second life you can upload your own textures, sounds, and model animations to the linden servers. This undoubtly takes up a ton of space. Flexibility of objects. Every object within second life is not only player created, but it's base properties (size, shape) can be manipulated. On top of that most items within the game are made up of multiple objects, so you can have up to thirty individual peices to make up a single hat or chair. Quite a bit of data to push around. On top of that you have the million different variants for the player models themselves, how big the eyes are, does the face slant to the left or the right, D or DD. These are completely different games with completely different amounts of data to push around. Saying second life is poorly managed simply because your game can handle the same number of people on less servers is ignorant and irresponsible.

Re:Is this a point of failure?

[Anonymous Coward]

You're misunderstanding. It's not that the server can only *handle* 3 users, its' that the average user-load of their servers is 3 users. The busy areas will have *many* more, and the empty areas will have none. I'll agree with the comments at the story about this being a *wonderful* environment for virtualization to allow multiple low-user areas to 'idle' on the same single piece of hardware.

Re:It limits the number of users to ~50

[MindStalker]

Just curious, lets say I am one of those ventures that buys large amounts of land in SL. Can I pay extra for a expensive server to run my land so that I can support hundreds on my 16-acre??