As things stand in SL, buying a sim (a 256 x 256 meter patch of "land" in SL) is buying time on a server that is dedicated to simulating that square piece of virtual land. That's a straightforward way to do things, but that fixed allocation is almost never the right amount. Of course, nobody's complaining when there are CPU cycles to burn, and you're on a deserted island with a sweet frame rate... but attend a popular SL event--for example, any performance by the magnificent Jaynine Scarborough--and you have a lag-fest that not many people can attend, even with the clever (and expensive!) dodge of putting the stage over a corner so the audience can be spread over four sims. This is a shame; in the specific example, I would like as many people as possible to hear (and appropriately tip!) Ms. Scarborough. Many people have pointed out this limitation as a major impediment to the appearance of very well-known performers in SL. (If you fill huge stadiums, are you going to go to the trouble for a bit over a hundred people tops?)
I have to hope that LL is rethinking this "one sim = one server" setup. There has to be some way to balance the load, so that the CPU cycles can, figuratively speaking, go where they're needed. In the limit, this has the curious consequence that if nobody's in a sim, there may be no servers spending any CPU cycles on it, a situation oddly reminiscent of Bishop Berkeley. I would also hope that, contrary to a temper tantrum I've seen thrown and assertions I've read, SL residents will either realize by considering the issue or be convinced by the results of such a redesign that it will greatly improve SL.
1 comment:
It's quite a tough problem to solve, to put it short :-) I've been thinking around multihost region servers with dynamic load balancing, but it's not ready to be translated in words yet... and some other code to write before that :)
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