Corey Linden posted on the Linden blog today to pre-empt a number of likely questions at tomorrow’s Town Hall (being held 5am Friday morning Australian east-coast time).
Theoretically, the level in this Town Hall should be at an all-time high as the SL population has never been greater. Corey Linden’s pre-emptive information does provide some explanations, particularly around inventory loss but the larger issue of general performance is brushed over:
“Grid stability and performance
As an aside, problems like teleport failures and inventory issues are not related to either Havok or Mono. While both will bring improvements to individual sim node’s performance and stability, they have no appreciable impact on problems related to back end systems. Havok 4 is in testing prior to hitting the Beta grid and the Mono project has fixed the major blockers for us, so we are waiting for resources to free up from other projects there.
Teleport failures could be the results of many different problems, and are definitely exacerbated by problems in agent presence. We have a team currently investigating this problem. Again, additional data points and reproducible cases would help them a lot.”
The story over on New World Notes confirms the anecdotal evidence of a stalling in concurrency – people are spending less time in-world due to ongoing frustrations with performance.
The key question to be asked and answered is what Linden Labs’ plans are for improving scalability and performance using the current central server model. Additionally, is any work being done on alternative models that are likely to see the light of day this year? We’ve posted a question for Corey Linden on the SL Forums thread devoted to that purpose:
What plans (if any) does LL have to internationalise the server configuration currently used and are there any plans in place to move away from a central server model?
We’ll post the transcript of the Town Hall as soon as it’s available.
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