Looking Inside the Second Life Data Centers 103
An anonymous reader writes "InformationWeek looks inside the data centers that power the game Second Life. Tidbits from the article: The software architecture is an extension of the virtual world metaphor of Second Life. At any time, it's possible to walk into one of Second Life's two data centers, pat one of the rack-mounted servers, and say that particular server is running virtual New York, or San Francisco, or ancient Rome, and imagine itty-bitty people and buildings inside the 1U rack-mounted servers.
Linden Lab, which develops and maintains Second Life, runs 2,000 Intel- and AMD-based servers in two co-location facilities in San Francisco and Dallas. And, contrary to widespread belief among Second Life users, Linden Lab has not decided whether to open-source the Second Life server software."
OpenSim? (Score:5, Interesting)
I dont think it matters too much, the opensim project has been making amazing strides using the BSD licensed libsecondlife code as a base. http://openmetaverse.org/wiki/OpenSim [openmetaverse.org]
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Most of the data is routed to the main servers. We could modify the client so it internetworks more, like with bittorrent file sharing for virtual objects. They've already started to do that with voice, as that feature's bandwidth doesn't go to the main servers. Lot's more can be done. It is just which software you trust.
There is this project - the Open Second Life Cross C [sourceforge.net]
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Thanks for the link. It is exactly what I have been looking for.
What exactly does this mean? (Score:1)
Well, it isn't a "good" system at all (Score:5, Interesting)
It works, up to a point but it is extremely limited.
If you read the article you will have noted that an area in the game is run on a single processor. That makes it fairly simple to grow, more areas == more servers.
But it is a bit like handling multi-tasking on your PC by adding more cores for every task. Run your OS, 1 cure, run a music player another core, run a game, another core, run a virus scanner, another core.
This is NOT the way things are done and for three reasons.
First it is wastefull, an empty area (no players) would still be using a full processor, granted probably a light one but it would be like having one Pentium4 cpu dedicated to running your mp3 player, even the cheapest available is going to be overkill.
Second it is limited, you can only use 1 cpu and they are still limited in how fast you can go, worse each speed increase is going to cost you more and more. So an area with lots of visitors will be unable to scale.
Last is that areas are seperated, you have to move from cpu to cpu as you move areas, this means transferring a lot of data even if you go from one desolate area to another.
Imagine if an ISP had every website on a single CPU box and that is the only option. Wastefull for small sites, not powerfull enough for large sites and a nightmare to administrate.
So why did they do it?
Well, it is relativly simple to setup. You don't need loadbalancing for instance or dynamic scaling. Customer simply buys a server space from you and that is the their server. It should in theory also be fairly robust, one cpu/server crashing won't really affect all the others. In a cluster setup one bit going down CAN (doesn't have to but it seems like it in MMORPG terms) take everything with it.
it is also cheap, they can use stock hardware buyable from any cheap box maker. Blizzard and Sony had to cough up some serious cash long before they could even open their game to get their servers running.
It is the reason why today the majority of hosting providers still work with crappy intel/amd boxes and not virtual servers on proper sun/ibm or some such hardware. It is cheap and you can get started with just one desktop PC (I seen server farms that had racks specially designed to house desktops, not racks).
More traditional setups for MMO's are to have clusters, each cluster is made up of a combination of hardware setup to serve a particular area. The advantage here is that you can more easily upgrade a cluster to handle a bigger load from an area. There are limits but more or less you can simply plug in more hardware to handle a high load. Offcourse such hardware is going to cost you.
The software for it is more complex to build and in all it is just more costly BUT in the long run more flexible.
Linden Labs had (still doesn't) have anywhere near the resources of a SOE or Blizzard. Their system worked for them but by now they are feeling the pinch as some areas just can't handle the load.
Their advantage is that customers themselves pay for the servers directly, so anyone with an underused area is wasting their own money, not Linden Labs. Same as when you buy a dedicated super server to serve you knitting club photo's. Your money your waste.
By the way, the above is based on an extremely old in depth article, it could well be that nowadays a sim (area) can use more then 1 cpu, but back in the day it couldn't
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Their server software can not scale. Basically commons area's flood with as much people as possible and then others leave due to the lag. It will be years and years before hardware is released that their server software will run on that can handle the load it'd need to handle.
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Assuming they do that, it seems the way they do it is far more efficient than what you seem to propose.
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--
Open Second Life Cross Compiler [sourceforge.net]
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but won't the grid servers be virtual servers ?
if so then the cpus and ram are going to be pooled, and inactive areas are not going to be using many resources.
if not it's as wasteful as you suggest.
Game? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Game? (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:Game? (Score:5, Funny)
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Whoosh (Score:3, Informative)
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-Eric
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But I have also spent lots of time "playing". Engaging in combat, playing hide and seek, chases, role playing, and just plain goofing around.
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But I have also spent lots of time "playing". Engaging in combat, playing hide and seek, chases, role playing, and just plain goofing around.
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Your idea of foreplay involves combat, "hide and seek" and chases? That sounds.. troubling.
I realize that explaining the mating rituals of the human being to a /. geek is probably a waste of time, but I'm an eternal optimist.
Many woman like to be pursued (synonym of chase), and it is not uncommon to equate the behavior of some women (especially teen and college age) to that of a game of hide and seek. As for combat... well, um, hmmm.... crap, you got me. I was blowing smoke. Is two out of three not good enough? Do I really have to reveal myself as a 13 year-old googly-eyed 60-pound weakli
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Some women like to be wrestled down and pinned. Other women like to be hit. Make sure your woman falls into one of these categories before trying this out.
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Did anyone else read that as "3D IRL"?
- RG>
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OSL? (Score:4, Interesting)
I think, instead of using Second Life as a base, they should have started from scratch and fixed some of the 'issues' with Second Life.
You can't use anything but primitives. Making a non-simple object often requires more polys and ingenuity than it should. A cowboy hat, for example.
Proprietary scripting language. Going with Lua (more popular) or Ruby (my choice) would not only be easier to use, but would also let budding geeks learn a good language. SL is implementing .NET, if I remember correctly, though. Not bad as a third choice.
Texture maps, shaders, etc, etc. SL supports no advanced graphical features.
I'm sure someone will say 'get off yer lazy butt and do it yourself', but it's obviously not that easy. I don't have the time, money, or skill to create an entire virtual 3D world that is user-scriptable. And gathering a team of those who DO have those things is tough on a from-scratch project.
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Regarding advanced graphical features, LL are adding reflections, but really, I don't think most people at the time want LL to work on scalability. Everybody I see is saying "scalability first, everything else second". So massive graphical improvements are probably going to come from o
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For example, SL could let you define a curve y(x) using simple polynomial functions and some other basic math (ln, e^x, sin, cos, etc) that's revolved around the x axis to generate a complex shape (the aforementioned cowboy hat, for example) without muddling in chopping up prims. But because it's still defined by a simple math function, computing important physics properties (They probably want volume / geometric center, mass / center of mass, and moments of inertia about
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IIRC, the shape constraints in SL are mostly imposed by Havok, the physics engine they use.
SL users also don't really have much power to spare: right now I'm getting 20 FPS, on a dual Athlon 64 X2 5200+, with a GeForce 7900GS. For most people, SL is seriously slow and they wouldn't like extra load to be added to the client.
In any case, the
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Daniel
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Residual self image (Score:3, Insightful)
At any time, it's possible to walk into one of Second Life's two data centers, pat one of the rack-mounted servers, and say that particular server is running virtual New York, or San Francisco, or ancient Rome, and imagine itty-bitty people and buildings inside the 1U rack-mounted servers.
"No...I don't believe it...let me out! I want out!"
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Agent Smith
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OMG (Score:2, Funny)
Pictures (Score:3, Insightful)
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Re:Pictures (Score:4, Interesting)
FOSS details from TFA (Score:4, Interesting)
Which is nice. However, not open-sourcing their server code is somewhat disappointing. Oh well, at least the client is open, someone else can create a FOSS server if the interest ever arises.
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"not open-sourcing their server code"
According to TFS and TFA both, LL hasn't decided yet.
"someone else can create a FOSS server"
As stated in a previous post, OpenSim is already in development. You can already log in and move around. No scripting yet, though.
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libsecondlife is coded in c# and nobody worries about whether it'll work with mono.
Re:FOSS details from TFA (Score:4, Informative)
"The libsecondlife and libsecondlife-java projects both provide the additional flexibility of having a BSD license,"
Your definition of 'not FOSS' is radically different from mine, then. BSD License is just about as open as you get.
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You are probably correct. My definition doesn't automatically allow projects written in C# with a BSD license to become FOSS.
If I used such a definition someone could send me a piece of mail with code in it encoded with PGP and say it has a BSD license. It wouldn't be very FOSS though if I didn't have the key to decode it. That's an extreme of course but it gives you the idea of what I'm say
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Wheres the server pr0n? (Score:5, Insightful)
Land prices are a scam, artificial land shortage (Score:1)
I did try Second Life, I wanted to try if I could have something similar to a web page into the virtual world.
I discovered that land price is artificially high, what happens is that "landlords" buy "islands" and then resell small plots at high margin.
Let me do a few calculations (correct me if any of the assumptions are wrong)
That's just good old capitalism for you pal! (Score:2)
You've never rented a property in real life, right?
How is this is different from real life?
Welcome to free market capitalism. You got something other people want, you shunt the price as high as you can.
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Virtual Land is infinite, real land is not.
There are differences in virtual world, differences that should be taken into account
Even in real life you can be ripped off (that means charged way above the "value" of the good you are buying
If the current value of Second Life Land is kept artificialyl high by Linden Policy of not releasing land then this seems a scam to me.
But whatever, if the rest of the people are happy like this then it must be ok :-)
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Virtual land is not infinite, unless you really think Linden Labs has developed computers with infinite processor power and hard drives and are just hiding the fact from us. Not to mention infinite bandwidth and infinitely fast network switches, without which having the first couple of things wouldn't help.
And there's no Linden Policy against releasing land. The main problem right now is, they're releasing it as fast as they possibly can and are still developing a longer and longer backlog of orders for
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That is patently incorrect. I assure you I can make a server with infinite land that runs on my calculator. If only a few people visit it and they don't do anything but look at it then it'll run fine. The size of the land has very little to do with how much power it needs. It's how many people are allowed into it, how many scripts t
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Incidentally, from what I hear it did work the way you say in the past, and you had to fly to get anywhere. Doesn't work that way anymore, and since the previous system was abandoned, they're unlikely to return to it.
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While land could be infinite, in the sense that you'd pay for resources consumed instead of chunks of space, it currently doesn't work that way in SL, although I've heard rumors of that they'd like it to work eventually that way. Then you could have all the la
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As a fairly old resident, I keep my L$500/week stipend for my premium account, which earns me about $16 a year. It can't get much better than having the company paying you instead of the other way. In fact, I wrote that blog entry because
Re:Land prices are a scam, artificial land shortag (Score:2)
The question at this point is whether Linden Labs will adapt to a market wher
They might want to upgrade... (Score:2)
Avatars still look like very old Poser characters. Animations for things as simple as walking are poorly done. People look like skittering wind up toys.
Performance is very, very poor, as always. Moving even a couple of virtual feet triggers up to several minutes of lag while thousands of objects load, usually in teeny bi
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The content of SL is so primitive and inconsistent there is no reward for the effort one has to make to get anywhere or find anyth
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Keep in mind that content in those games is already pre-loaded on your computer. Everything in SL has to load dynamically (since all content is player created). So the reason that SL is sometimes slow isn't a lack of processing power, but a lack of bandwidth.
-Eric
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Security! (Score:2)
Who says they'll stop at patting? What if they cripple the servers?! It sounds like Linden need to hire some security.
Second Life in the Toronto Star today (Score:1)
(Virtual) reality bites [thestar.com]
(Not sure if that's the same title used on the dead tree version I read this morning.)1 server per "place"? (Score:3, Funny)
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-Eric
What about storage? (Score:2)
Storage... it aint sexy but you know you want it...
Yup (Score:2)
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location location location (Score:1)
Inter-server communication (Score:2)
What would happen if everyone moves their avatar to the edge of an area and look towards another area? Would this bring down the communication between the two servers?