'Second Life': Don't worry, we can scale

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"Can it scale indefinitely? Absolutely," Rosedale said. "It can scale to infinity. The underlying architecture of the Internet and of 'Second Life' is perfectly scalable."

He said that most massively multiplayer online games, like "World of Warcraft" and "EverQuest II," are designed around a central database that does the heavy lifting of managing as many concurrent users per server as possible.

By comparison, the "Second Life" environment is spread across its many servers, which Rosedale said are in a "tiled network" whose demands on the central database are akin to that of e-mail.

"We just throw new machines at it all the time," he said. "So it is we who have the scalable architecture."

While there may be questions in the online-games community about Linden Lab's server strategy, the model has proven successful for other companies.

"It works pretty well for Google and Yahoo," said Gordon Haff, a senior analyst at Illuminata who was not familiar with Linden Lab's architecture.

'Radically different' approach
"It sounds like an approach where they can segment the tasks by segmenting the data structure," added Dan Kusnetzky, formerly the vice president of systems software research for IDC who is now executive vice president of marketing at Open-Xchange. "And that sounds like a good tradeoff."

Kusnetzky agreed with Haff that other companies have succeeded with Linden Lab's model.

"You can get some unbelievable scalability stories if you can think through the stories and build a lightweight architecture," he said. "That's how Google and Yahoo do it."

In any case, some say "Second Life" is already bigger than they ever expected.

"They're succeeding because of their radically different approach to this business," said Edward Castronova, an expert on virtual worlds and an associate professor of telecommunications at Indiana University.

Indeed, while most online games make money by charging every user a monthly fee, "Second Life" is free to play unless a user wants to own land. Linden Lab makes its money off of land-use fees, the sale of its virtual currency and monthly fees paid by land owners.

Rosedale said Linden Lab isn't yet profitable, but soon will be.

He also acknowledged that "Second Life" has a difficult user interface that is an impediment to massive adoption and that Linden Lab has to work on that. He pointed to potential future plans to let users create their own "skins" for the interface, a step that would give control over the interface, like all other "Second Life" content, to users.

Castronova, who said he does have some worries about the "Second Life" business model, said it's worth sticking around to find out what happens.

"Regarding (their) business model, I have the anxiety of someone who went out to explore a river," he said, "and I'm already 200 miles further than I ever thought I would get and there's still more river. Scary, but I have to keep going."

[Christopher Hall]

Let's see, carry the two...

If peak load on 2,579 servers is (a whopping!) three users, that puts 7,737 people on at any given time. Given that every hour of the day is "peak" to someone, giving Second Life the benefit of the doubt by multiplying that number by 24 (a gross overestimate) lands them at 185,688 active user accounts. To reach 6.5 million users in two years, they would need to recruit 263,096 people per month or about 8,650 people per day. That doesn't even account for the inevitable growth of World of Warcraft.

Big dreams, no doubt, but it ain't happening.

[handdrawn]

And...

According to their current scheme, they'd need 2,166,667 servers to handle the hoped-for 6.5-million users. And if they're adding 8,650 people day, as your calculation suggests, they also need to be adding 2,883 new servers every day.

Now, I'm no network administrator/IT guy, but wouldn't the costs of implementing and maintaining over 2.1 million servers be prohibitively high?

Sure, the hardware is scaleable... but what about the support and administration costs?

[wolframalpha]

http://www.cari.net/benefits-of-cloud-computing.html

This is were all Second Life applications are headed we have recently reactiongrid.com is supposedly about to take on this new level of server that can grow as fast as a click of a mouse. Very cool and exciting and indeed is now very possible.

[Chung Leong]

Perfect problem for server virtualization to solve

The problem with the architecture described is that it's a very inefficient way to allocate resources. Virtual acreage correspond poorly with real workloads in terms of computation. If there are few people in an area, then the server dedicated to it ends up idling. Virtualization software from VMWare can greatly improve the efficiency here by shifting virtual servers around a cluster of computers as demand dictates.

[jabbotts]

possibly a good problem for virtualization at least

I might recommend Xen rather than VMWare assuming they are already using a unix/linux cluster.

The thing to consider may be effective horsepower rather than virtual server mobility. An OS running on raw hardware is always going to run faster than an OS running inside a virtual box running on an OS running on raw hardware.

Is the loss in prossessing power from layering going to balance against the ability to move a "peaking" virtual machine from one hardware environment to another.

I've not yet had a good look at virtualization but I'd also be curious to see if a virtual server can be shared among multiple physical boxes like a raid drive spans multiple physical hard drives. There may be benifit to being able to dump a bunch of cheap boxes behind a virtual server if the workload is constant enough to justify it.

[Draco-1]

Puzzle Pirates?

---
"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."
---

*blink* He's comparing a 2D chat program with boardgames to a graphical 3D MMO platform with user-created content? Anyone else see this comparison as absurd?

As for the three users per server, that's just screwy math. Whoever came up with that number just took peak users and devided them by the numer of servers. That is an Average Distributed Load, *NOT* Maximum capacity. Each sim can handle 40 users, and most of the 'servers' can handle 4 sims. So that's actually 160 users per server, making SL's theoretical maximum load about 412,000 concurrent users.

Dunno about you, but that sure looks like a *TON* of scalability to me.

[thomasl824]

Registration

I've attempted to register a few times over the alst few days but they do not seem to be accepting "basic accounts" at this point.

[Draco-1]

Registration

There might be some issues because they are revamping the sign-up process to streamline it. Don't worry, they aren't doing away with the Free Basic Accounts.

[xandersturn]

Flawed math

Ok, so i hear two things.

1) Each server handles "16 acres" of land
2) Based on number of servers vs. number of users, each server handles 3 users during peak.

It sounds like that in order for each server to only have a load of 3 users, based on Second Life's "scaling" method, users would have to be evenly spread across the entire game world, only 3 users per 16 acres of land. Most other mmo's have servers handle per connection, so even distribution is guaranteed.

Was there something not included in the reporting of second life's network, or is their network architecture flawed in that a popular area in the world filled with users in one spot could drain one server's resources dry while THOUSANDS of other servers sit idle?

[Draco-1]

No..

The math is not flawed exactly, more like the statistic was used in a misleading manner. Peak mean the most users on simultaneously in a given period of time. Peak does *NOT* mean the maximum possible. A bus can hold 40 people, but in a small town, it's peak might be 10 people. It doens't mean the bus can't handle another 30 people, just that only at most 10 have ever ridden at the same time.

See my post titled "Puzzle Pirates?". SL can handle 160 users per server theoretically.

[pdude]

A classic case of parallelism

The architecture seems like a case for parallelism rather than WEB's request/response model. Each client request should be pre-processed and split into multiple requests and store in a queue. Later one of the server/server process can pick up each queued item and process them. The results should be stored in the client queue and merged to form the complete response.

The downside is the client will not get the response immediately, however it will get the last response.

[bdennis410]

Brave New World

Did he write "Matrix" or did it write him?
It may not be long now, folks.
Next step, virtual world economics, a free-market economy where the money in the virtual world can be banked in the real world; it's already a one- way street, we just need to allow the players to build businesses, sell products and services, MAKE MONEY!!
Right now Second Life has a "monopoly" (pun intended) on it's virtual world. What about a virtual world that works like the real world? Only in "virtual" you can start at any age(there are no ages). Then you can maybe start a business, bank money, buy virtual supplies (are we ready for virtual "E-bay?"), set up a virtual web site/store front, and make money!
Wait a minute! We can do that now!
Would we be "better" at it in "virtual"? Would we be more entrepreneurial? Would it cost less in Virtual? Would the chancews of success be better.
Who is the God in a virtual world? Can we organize a Virtual religion, pray to our Virtual God? Get a marriage license, have a relationship. in Virtual?
I await the outcome. I suggest that Second Life find an opportunity to design a New World.
I've got some ideas.

Diogenes

[bdennis410]

Web site errors

I just tried to post a long, pithy, and well reasoned, humourous comment on the "Don't worry, we can scale" story, and guess what?
Again, you generated a "404 error-page not found". Your web site continues to develop and create problems.
Worst, your return to the page you started from erases your Comment. If you didn't "make a copy" before you sent it, you're SOL!!
I'm making a copy of this one, just in case.
Diogenes

[play7]

More BS

Ok I am throwing up now! Your not even close with WW...............OMG when is this nightmare of a PR going to stop!