Thursday, April 26, 2007

How Linden Labs becomes 'the next Google', by reducing lag.

This is the second article in a series. The first article can be found here

Lag in a sim is when time seems to slow down. Everyone is moving only very slowly. This happens because the server computer, the sim, cannot complete all necessary calculations within the allotted time. I have been trying to determine the causes of lag, but that is very difficult. Scripts can cause lag, that is for sure. But too many visitors seem to be able to cause lag too. At this point i suspect that maybe even the fact that some user in the sim has a very slow computer might affect lag.

Again we see something akin to the web. Sites used to go down because of their success. How ironic, you get so many visitors that the sim slows down to a crawl, so the visitors leave again.

But here the problem is more fundamental. I work at a web development company. Some of our clients' websites get hundreds of thousands of visitors per day. They have huge collections of servers, with load balancing, distributed databases and the lot, serving just a single website. The same should be possible in Second Life, a successful sim with lots of visitors might have dozens of servers backing it, while some other quiet sim might have only one.

Currently the system in place is pretty simple and intuitive (except for the separation between mainland and private estate, more about that later), tier fee is related to land, land is related to a sim, so you essentially buy hosting space, quite literally. Land can have only limited constructions on them (built of prims) and each prim can have only a limited amount of scripts in them. Each script has a maximum amount of memory it may use and the operations in a script can be executed only a limited amount of times per time unit, because of built in function delays.

I see two big problems.
The first is that if someone puts the maximum amount of scrips allowed in every prim on his land he can bring the simulator to a crawl. Worse is that people can wear prims on themselves, and have scripts running in them, bringing the simulator to a crawl even without owning any land there..
The second big problem is that if you have a successful sim, you might actually need those scripts to run, and the only way to get more computing power is to buy more land. But you can't share prims and scripts accross sims... Which leads to some peculiar constructions...


This is me standing in PokerPalace. Nothing peculiar yet, but wait until we check the map...



That is peculiar! Poker Palace is built at the center of 4 simulators! Most of the simulators are empty, apart from a small section in the corner of each sim. There is only one reason that the sim owner has built it this way: Lag.

This is a shame i think. The fact that the casino owner has to pay more to get more cpu power is no problem, but the way it is tied to the land is posing problems in scalability... Poker Palace essentially can't grow any further without having to set up a second casino... it already uses the maximum of 4 sims!

Now if Linden Labs could get that fixed, they would be one step closer to becoming the nex Google.

How Linden Labs becomes 'the next Google', by reducing downtime.

Well, with Second Life being down for the second day in a row, I thought I spend some time writing down my views on what Linden Labs needs to accomplish to become 'the next Google'.
  1. Reduce downtime
  2. Reduce Lag! Change script / prim limit handling.
  3. Open up the server more
  4. Internationalize!
  5. Allow delegation of most functionality to web services
  6. Be careful with creating new land
  7. Unite mainland and Estate concepts
  8. Change tier fee handling
  9. Change TOS to accept more responsibility
  10. Make it browser based.
I plan to write about all of the above ten points that i listed above, more or less in order of priority, in future posts. In this post I'll concentrate on the first point, reducing downtime, which is appropriate now that SL is, well.. down.

Reducing downtime is so important, because in order for Second Life to evolve towards the 3D internet dream, uptime has to be an almost guaranteed 100 % for the grid, just as it is with the web today. And just like the web, individual simulators (websites) may be down now and then, but even short downtime can cost you lots of visitors for a long time. If Google would be down, say once every month, for say, 20 minutes, I'd probably not use it, especially if the outages would be unpredictable. At the moment Second Life is in a phase where a lot of people are discovering it. People that are not die hard fans of virtual worlds like the old user base, but that are just checking it out, because they heard about it on the news. Some of those people will become new regular inhabitants, but too much downtime will chase a lot of them out again. Scheduled maintenance is better then unexpected downtime, but in the long run the system will not be deemed reliable, but reliably unreliable. You know for sure you can't rely on the service always, at any time. You know for sure it will be down.

Wednesday, April 25, 2007

Second Life

If you haven't experienced Second Life yourself yet, don't get your hopes up too high about this great new game, because it is not a game. If you enter Second Life thinking you're going to play some great game you will probably be disappointed. If you work your way past that and the often quirky feeling controls, you might discover something else though, that Second Life is quite unique. It's not a game just like the web is not a game. It's 3D-internet, sort of.

A lot of places in Second Life are pretty boring. You'll find yourself clicking on thumbs-up icons on a world map, to visit a Popular Place, only to end up in some casino where no-one is playing but lot's of avatars are just sitting or standing there, their Real Life alter ego's presumably not even at the keyboard. This phenomena is called camping, where land owners actually pay visitors to spend time there, because it will boost their traffic and thus their search rankings. There are more vibrant places, but there too, interaction is mostly limited to chat, having your avatar get into some 'pose' (sitting, having a drink, relaxing and of course a multitude of sex poses) or buying stuff.

This probably makes Second Life appear pretty dull, but actually it's not. It has that certain quality that people may remember of the early web. Even though the current state of affairs isn't that impressive, people realize that this is something new that has a lot of potential. And although interaction is pretty limited at the moment, the potential is there for it to grow. Just like the early web consisted mostly of static pages and the odd contact form here and there, the potential was there for it to grow and evolve, and it did.

And there is that other thing. That addictive thing that makes you want to see what comes next. And something always comes next, because Second Life's world is continually expanding, growing and evolving. And it all happens very fast. I remember buying a 512 square meter plot of land in an empty grassy area one night. When I logged in the next morning I could hardly believe my eyes. My parcel of land was surrounded by buildings and construction of all sorts, all created there overnight.

And that in itself is very interesting. I bought a plot of land in a certain area, only to find it totally transformed the next day. Others too had bought land there and had built all sorts of things, some less beautiful then others, to put it mildly. After spending some more time in Second Life I realized that people there where doing the same kind of things as happen in RL. They buy lot's of land so they can control the scenery. For example, one Second Life inhabitant named Price Pyle buys large pieces of land, terraforms them (shaping the ground), put's roads in them and then sells pieces of it at a time. Most roads survive after all is sold. If you would want to build a road in a simulator (Area of the world, also called a sim) that had many owners, it would be very difficult. Everybody wants to have a piece of land at the road, but no one wants the road on their land, it should be on the neigbour's land right? What Price Pile does is sell parcels of land that have a piece of one lane of the road on it. The neightbour has the piece of the other lane et cetera. People actually pay more money for that kind of land, because it has been pre-developed for them. Price Pyle is acting like a real estate developer, and all new land owners share the cost of the road, because that is how he designed it.

It's market economy at work. If you have played and enjoyed Sim City type of games, Second Life might be something for you, but you would have to please real people that actually chat to you and complain if something is wrong!

And that's another interesting aspect of Second Life. It's real-time (well.. I'll discuss 'lag' later) and you're all there together. You are now reading this blog post, but who else is 'here'? In Second Life you actually see them... standing there. It has a presence that does not exist on the web that could be an opportunity to get past the FAQ section on the website most 'Support' links lead to, to the kind of customer intimacy that was previously only associated with real life stores.

Imagine a webshop where pressing the help button would result in a chat dialog with a store clerk. What is the shipping cost on this item? Do you support such-and-such creditcard? The things you sometimes want to ask when considering a purchase, but can't, forcing you to do 'work' digging up this info, instead of having 'fun' shopping. Now imagine the web shop being fully 3D, allowing you to walk around the items for sale, examine them from all sides, asking questions to store clerks that you can see standing there... I really see opportunity here. When I ran my web company all clients that wanted a 3D web shop for a few hundred euros drove me crazy. Now, with Second Life, i can actually offer them just that.

I could go on for a while, but if you really haven't experienced Second Life yet I don't want to take up more of your time than I already have. Go try it yourself! Now! :-)
And remember, look beyond the surface... the future looks bright indeed.

Yet Another Blog

This is the first post to this new blog of mine. Because I have been spending a lot of time in Second Life lately i thought it would be fun to blog about it sometimes. My inworld name is OddesE Oh, hence the blog name.

In RL I spend a lot of time reading technical news, or economic news on technical companies and I feel a certain need to comment on their actions, so this blog won't be limited to second life entries.