Happy Ten Thousand to Second Life:
New World Notes: Concurrent Affair
Seems like SL has reached the 10,000 concurrency mark, which is surprising in a number of ways – less than a year ago, two or three thousand players online at once was more usual, and yet it’s actually a surprisingly low number, considering all the news and hype and talk you see on the thing.
For perspective, this figure works out at about three full World of Warcraft servers, out of literally hundreds, or about a third of the EVE Online cluster at its busiest, still making SL something of a niche game in the grand scheme of it all. Whenever I read about it, or indeed, travel its world, I always end up with the impression of it being a much bigger thing than it really is, largely because unlike the more traditional MMO, there is no overriding attempt on the part of the developers to create and manage any kind of optimal player density - the Ironforge Effect, as it were. We at Van Hemlock do not condone everyone on the server going to the same place at once! In SL, players are neither encouraged, nor discouraged, to be in specific places at specific times (through loot or levels), and are largely left to their own devices.
SL’s unusual architecture has often attracted comment from knowledgeable outsiders, as being inefficient on this score. The typical region or ‘Sim’ – SL’s equivalent of a zone – tends to see an average player population of just three and many Sims see no visitors at all for long periods. I’m not entirely sure, but I suspect these lands still continue to exist even when no-one is there. On the other end of population, most Sims I visit seem to die on their arse some time after reaching the thirty-five players mark, making the idea of hosting Virtual Duran Duran concerts problematic at best, and it’ll be interesting to see what LL do to make that a feasible event. I’ve no idea what fourty-man raiding is like in WoW, but that sized group would most likely kill any SL Sim stone dead in seconds.
But while this would definitely be no way to run a proper MMO, it would seem that in SL’s case, with their various land payment and purchase schemes, it probably pays for itself. Land owning players, via the Tier scheme and subscriptions, seem to pay their way on a kind of per-use basis – list here – so while it might be inefficient, enough new private island sims (supposedly run on their own hardware) keep appearing on the map to suggest that it’s certainly viable to operate things in this manner, and their claims of scalability might have some merit. I’ve no idea if those figures are reasonable for what is effectively a kind of advanced web-hosting package, but I’d be surprised if it did not cover costs at the least. It does make distributed systems which plunder unused resources from empty sims to supplement busy ones tricky though, since someone else is paying for that empty Sim, and this might be considered stealing in some ways, or at least some kind of breach of service. All a bit confusing, and probably something for Terms of Service wranglers as much as network developers.
Some things seem difficult to decentralise however; the chat and Instant Message handling, teleporting and the world-map, account management, and most notably the asset database, and the more concurrent users there are, the more these ‘hub’ systems will be put under pressure. The asset server in particular is a bit of a concern. Every single thing you see, hear, read or interact with in SL, is all stored in one massive database somewhere, by necessity. If you make a widget, then sell copies of it, SL needs to be able to refer to one master copy of the widget, to be able to make new copies of it, so that all your customers end up with the same widget. With the added complication of RMT, and items having a real world value, this becomes a bit of a security issue as well. While everyone has an inventory, which may or may not appear to have all their virtual widgets in, what they in fact have, is just a list of little links to the actual widgets, stored in whatever database system LL have at their HQ. The links allow access to copies of the master widget in a variety of ways – temporarily, editable, copyable, transferable, and so on, but every time any of the ten thousand players do anything with something in their inventory, this one master source of widget information must be interrogated, never mind all the folks like me that are adding entirely new widgets at what must be a prodigious rate overall, and if LL’s bold claims of an infinitely scaleable metaverse are going to be proven wrong, it’ll be here.
I’m certainly no database architect, but I can’t see any way to decentralise this asset store in such a way as the land itself has been, without ending up with a different set of objects per Sim. I’m sure wiser minds than mine, including and especially, at Linden Lab have a plan though, and I could be misunderstanding how the system works anyway.
It’s hard to tell, given the rather anarchic freedom residents are allowed regarding the composing and execution of their own scripts, but I’m sure the Grid (The term for all of SL as a whole) has been noticeably slower and laggy over the last month or two, and worse still in recent weeks, with more server outages than there used to be. Still, finding myself in the right place at the right time for once, I’m determined to see how far SL can go before something deep inside a supercomputer somewhere goes pop and this promising and curious new world disappears overnight, or as is more likely, simply cannot grow any further.
But ten thousand is ten thousand, and the number shows no obvious signs of slowing down at present, so while I tend to believe SL is in for a bit of a bump some day, I doubt it’s any day soon.
Note: If you’re a long time packrat like me, you can do your part by emptying the Trash folder. I had about 10,000 items in my inventory after about 10 months – mostly huge lists of freebie items from various boxes, but being brutal with the trash reduced that to nearer 7,000, which can’t help but make things a bit easier on the asset server, especially since just placing an copyable object on the floor, and then deleting it, will still result in a new object appearing in your trash. Most inefficient!