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Second Life has too many servers, in danger of eating Internet
CNet has an interesting article questioning Second Life’s fiscal sanity:
“Second Life” currently runs on 2,579 servers that use the dual-core Opteron chip produced by AMD. Each server is responsible for an individual “sim,” or 16 acres of virtual “Second Life” land. At peak usage that means that each server is handling about three users.
Well, uh, thats… um… I’ll let everyone’s favorite pirate respond.
“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.”
Philip Rosedale, Linden’s CEO, responded that their architecture was similar to Google, so no worries. Not mentioned: Google has slightly more concurrent users than Second Life, and probably serves more than, uh, three users per server. A more tenable response is that SL actually sells server space; owning “land” in SL can run a user up to $200 a month, which is in line with many rack-mounted server solutions for other web applications.
When thought of as another type of internet daemon, this almost makes sense. When thought of as a game server, it makes my wee head explode into goo.
(Thanks to AFKgamer for the link)
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about 4 years ago
It’s too bad they stopped developing the VW and turned their focus to real estate development.
about 4 years ago
I got the impression, reading the SL website, that they want the users to entertain themselves. They made a huge deal about a guy who developed a game inside SL and then sold the rights to said game for real life moolah. And they’re quite cozy with companies like IGE. The idea that any land can do, well, anything has some good points to it. But the fact that they’re running massive server banks for few users that probably don’t pay to play (SL is free)… well, unsustainable isn’t a sufficient word for that. It’s kinda like watching Iran play with nukes. There’s no one sufficient word for that. Sooner or later the house of cards folds and burns. I just hope I’m there for the inevitable fire sale of dual core servers
about 4 years ago
Thats just flipping insane. Commodity hardware and scalability are wonderful things, but just because you’re flush with venture cash does not mean you should be stuffing sock puppets full of benjamins and lighting them on fire in hopes that the smoke will cause someone to want to order pet food from you. I wonder what the utilization is on those servers — surely 50% of them are at 1% CPU usage all of the time, right?
about 4 years ago
SL is laggy as hell. I liked exploring, but hated walking/flying 20ft, wating for the area to load, discoving it was YALAC (Yet Another Lame-Ass Casino), walking/flying another 20ft, etc. This in combination with the atrotious modeler UI, led me to quit this “free” game. Not very Social either, when you average 3 people per zone.
about 4 years ago
Since every server is already paid for by users before it’s ever set up, financially it is VERY sustainable. They can keep buying new servers all day long that way and keep profits high.
However, it is certainly very inefficient. They could use dynamic server loads to run the whole game on many many fewer servers by allocating processing power to sims based on who is in it. The downside there is that if a flood of players move into Sim A all of a sudden, if the dynamic server setup isn’t on top of it’s game then there may be problems as the load sloshes around.
And really, since every sim is paid for, there’s not much in the way of monetary incentive to be more efficient. They’ve got more money than they know what to do with over there. I’d bet it’s probably the most profitbale game on the market from a per-player basis by several orders of magnitude. And it ain’t venture cash, Patrick McKenzie, it’s end-user payments from clients. Just for the record.
about 4 years ago
They\’e2\’80\’99ve got more money than they know what to do with over there. I\’e2\’80\’99d bet it\’e2\’80\’99s probably the most profitbale game on the market from a per-player basis by several orders of magnitude. And it ain\’e2\’80\’99t venture cash, Patrick McKenzie, it\’e2\’80\’99s end-user payments from clients. Just for the record.
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Then explain to me why they’ve yet to turn a single penny of profit? It seems to me that this is probably partially related to enormous capital expenditures which may or may not ever see their total cost recouped. Even if lightning strikes and they do manage to keep every server in operation and every “land owner” subscribed for the year and change it will take to pay the cost of the hardware back, they could have made *more* money in that happy situation by scaling capacity in a more economical manner.
http://news.com.com/Second+Life+scores+11+million+in+funding/2100-1043_3-6054598.html?tag=nefd.top
about 4 years ago
According to what I was told at E3, every SL sever is running the in-game physics all the time, even when no one is in that piece of land. So all the hardware is always active all the time. Maybe a physics co-processor from Ageia or ATI would help them out…
Bruce
about 4 years ago
Holy crap! Okay, I stand corrected.
A few months ago a group of us playing SL worked through the math of land use fees -vs- sims up and running and determined they’re taking in at least five million a month at a minimum, and probaby a bit more than that since we calculated assuming every sq ft of sim was being paid for at the lowest bulk rates and many are definately not. And that doesn’t include the setup fees they charge for complete sims, and those are pretty huge as well (just not recurring).
I can’t imagine what they’re spending all the money on.
about 3 years ago
rape pics. rape videos. rape sites