Could you use a personal server to speed up sim performance for everyone on that sim?

[Amie Kaestner]

Like, say you had a pretty impressive server in your home. Could you use that server's power to ease a sim's lag, but for everyone who's on that sim and not just yourself? Are you allowed to hook private servers up to sims?

[Luc Starsider]

As far as I know, you can not hook up your own server to power a second life sim. Nor can you run a server on your server and add to the SL grid.

This kind of setup is possible on other grids, but not in SL.

But, I could be wrong...

- Luc -

[valerie Inshan]

I am with Luc. It is maybe possible on an OpenSimulator, but not in SL.

http://opensimulator.org/wiki/FAQ

[Rolig Loon]

I cannot imagine Linden Lab wanting the security nightmare of having someone else's server attached to their network.  I would be alarmed if they even considered it.

[Nalates Urriah]

Technically it is possible. However, the Lab is not going to allow it. Since they control access to the servers providing backend services, it is unlikely that control can be circumvented.

One of the main problems with allowing third party servers is protection of IP rights. That problem makes it very hard in the OpenSim worlds to protect IP rights. All items move through the region servers and can be ripped off by the one controlling the server.

One of the big lag producers is the amount of cross communication between regions and users. Moving a server out of the main data centers would greatly increase packet travel time region to region. The Lab recently arranged adjacent regions to run in physically adjacent servers. That probably only changed packet travel time by a few milliseconds. But, it was enough to provide a significant performance improvement.

Packet travel time in the data center is likely less than 10ms and probably 1 to 3 ms. Moving to an outside server would increase that time to 30 to 100 ms, which would be a huge hit.

[Lindal Kidd]

You can use your server to power several OpenSim regions and connect them to the Hypergrid or to a shared grid like OSGrid.  You don't need a ton of computing power either -- I run four regions on OSGrid while I am logged into SL, or doing any of the other things I do with my computer.

You can't hook your server to a closed world like Second Life, though.