The Easter weekend saw large concurrency on the grid and things held up relatively well, albeit with some glitches. As relative newcomers to daily immersion in Second Life, we’re behind the eight-ball in realising how restrictive the central server model is on community events specifically and end user enjoyment more generally.

An effective 50 to 60 avatar limit on a event is obviously restrictive, both for the people who miss the event and the fifty who may be dealing with significant lag during the event. Islands are now considered a great value proposition because of the likelihood of reduced lag. Our own in-world launch was modest but managed to crash the server once we got above 45 avatars. The ABC Island / Four Corners launch had quite a number of people trying to access the island unsuccessfully due to it being ‘full’.

Critics of Second Life say the issue is the centralised server model and I’m yet to see any significant rebuttal of the claim. Potential competitors like Outback Online are touting the peer-to-peer (P2P) model as being the solution, claiming a 10 000 avatar population at an event as being feasible. If P2P is able to replicate the virtual world experience at the level Second Life has achieved whilst dramatically increasing concurrency of population, then the stampeded is likely to be significant. That said, I wouldn’t be alone in both hoping and assuming that with Linden Labs going the open source route, a P2P model may be in the platform’s future. Or at the very least a significant performance breakthrough that makes more than fifty people in a room a bearable experience.

What are your thoughts on the issue – if a competitor offered better performance would you pull up stumps and go elsewhere?