Getting closer

There is one remarkable statement about Second Life: As of beginning of january 2007 the registered user database has increased by 30%. Second life has just crossed the 3 million users barrier. The consequences are somewhat distracting: First of all SL rapidly gets overcrowded by new users dropping in the welcome zone frequently. On some days even residents could not log in any more due to temporary closage of their home. Then we saw lots of system failures, missbehaviours like flickering screens, database failures and so on.

Within the last 15 days period i had to downbload and install three or four client updates for the SL viewer, each of about 30 MBytes in size. The system typically insist on the update installation. I would not be able to log into the system when i refused to upgrade. Oh it was soo frustrating. But forseeable. Meanwhile SL have added quite a few drop zones (where new users appear when they materialize the first time in SL) and things calm down a bit. But the overall problem will probably not disappear, since they never can win a race against an exponential growth.

So will Second life fall down as fast as it jumed up ? Well, as soon as the system gets into an overload state, it will probably start distracting new users. I won’t dare to predict how the acceptance will evolve in the future. But i allready see some potential systemic flaws in the concept of SL regarding to mass usage:

1. SL is built up on a huge processor-farm, probably located in one data center somewhere in USA. This is per se non scalable. How will SL behave when the millions of users currently registered will eventually take up speed and start utilizing SL frequently? Handling millions of users needs scalability at its best. How will SL react on such a huge load ? Let’s try to predict at which user load the system will degrade: Just to remind: we currently see about 30,000 to 35,000 concurrent users in the grid. We have about 3000 grid nodes . We know that a grid can handle about 50 concurrent users at a time. More Avatars on one spot lead to severe system degradation. So it looks like the maximum capacity of the current grid is 50 avatars time 3000 grids = 150000 avatar. well the Avatar density is not equaly spread in SL, so we allready see unavailabilities of popular places. You may predict by yourself, about when the system will start getting instable.
2. SL is completely closed technology. Despite the fact that they have opened their Viewer to the open source, they host a proprietary system. There are virtually no possibilities to share data to any extend. As far as i learned the following basic features are not present in SL:
   1. They offer no chat logs nor IM (instant message) logs
   2. You can not import/export topological data (preformed topologies)
   3. Neither can any constructed object be exported/imported. You can upload images,sound files and animations though (the latter i did not test)
   4. You can not run a simulation on your own computers. You MUST order a grid point at lindens data center.
   5. The inworld search facilities are missing quality. This can be done much better.
   6. The whole user GUI is extremely slow. Even any local typing seems to be directly transmitted to the SL hosts on a by character basis. This is incredible to say the least.
   7. Security isues. Can the provider monitor the chat loggs ? Will the provider do that? Remind that they (Linden labs) have complete control over the system. They can act on any data structure at their will. What if i want to keep my secrecy? I am million miles away from trusting the system by any means.

So what now ? Lets see, we are not yet at the end of our thoughts. There is more to come tomorrow.

Stay tuned.

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