Australian SL servers on the horizon?

The transcript of the Town Hall held earlier today provides a small glimmer of hope for Australians frustrated with the lag in SL. In response to a question on internationalising the server locations, Corey Linden provided this snippet:

“We absolutely want to deploy servers overseas. We have an architectural quirk in how we talk to the dbs — a layer of single threaded dataservers – that would suffer in situations with greater ping latency, so we need to fix that problem first, which is being worked on. Once that is fixed, we will begin international deployments. This is critical since over 65% of our use is from outside the US.”

Of course, Australia is very unlikely to be part of the early expansion – Europe and Asia are the obvious targets. However, the combination of Australian SL servers and the next-generation architecture should surely provide some relief in the medium term. The challenge is delivering the goods before competitors do.