Suggestion - Pay those with fast Connections to act as proxy servers

[Mirika Drasilova]

Suggestion - Pay those with fast Connections to act as proxy servers

How about this those with fast, fibre optic connections could be paid to allow part of their bandwidth to be used as proxy servers for the main Linden Labs servers while logged in, get paid by the hour or something like that?

DSL connections probably would not be up to the load.

 

Would it make SL run  at a crawl for them or could it be restricted to a certain amount of traffic, also the other issues I can think of are confidentiality and privacy.

 

[Sephy McCaw]

It is more then likely that it would be slower then receiving info from the Linden based serves as they would have a 1 gigabit (120MBps) / 10 Gigabit (1.2GBps) upload speeds where as home users would likely have under 100Megabits (12 MBps) upload. 

[Duckie Dickins]

A less scupulous person would also be allowed to sniff all of your network traffic. As it is now, anyone can operate an anonymous proxy but it still opens up large security issues.

[Theresa Tennyson]

I'm not really sure how much proxy servers would help performance. I can see them helping a situation where large numbers of people are trying to access the same data but most of the time data access in SL is tracking down the single instance of a certain object in the entire virtual world. Even if you take into account that multiple people may have the same items, the possibility of modifying them means that data requests are very specific. Also, things like region simulators have to respond and be modified in real time and duplicating them would cause problems.

[Toysoldier Thor]

Another long standing limit is at the viewers themselves which have been hard bandwidth limited to 1mbps.  Even though the Network and Cache tab under the Parameter settings has a slider that allows a person to set his/her viewer's bandwidth to "unlimited", LL has already stated that setting the bandwidth any higher than 1mbps is of no value.

I even brought this topic up with the Lindens at one of this Fall's now defuncted Friday Sim Usergroup meetings.  I asked them if the viewer's bandwidth has no effective value above 1mbps, why does LL and Phoenix allow the parameter to be set any higher?  Basically its only a JOY BUZZER setting.

LL staff agreed that it doesnt make sense.  I suggested they should simple hard set the network bandwidth setting to 1mbps so as not to trick people into thinking they can get more throughput.  They thought it was an idea to consider.  I doubt they did anything about it.

BUT... basically it dont matter if you have a 5m, 10m, 100m, 1000m.... you are not getting more than 1mbps.

Also, as stated, most of the content that users need from the LL servers is UNIQUE content (since the stuff that is not unique is cached is eventually cached in your viewer cache).  There might be a little value in getting your cache filled by a proxied cache point but I would suspect that network throughput from LL is a critical factor to lag.  In fact, if a Prox y Cache would be effective, LL themselves could put a farm of them in front of their entire sim server farm.  Maybe they even do.

[Coby Foden]

---

Toysoldier Thor wrote:

LL has already stated that setting the bandwidth any higher than 1mbps is of no value.

---

I think you mean:

1 Mbps (Mega bits per second)

not

1 mbps (milli bits per second)

:matte-motes-nerdy:  :smileywink:

[Toysoldier Thor]

---

Coby Foden wrote:

---

Toysoldier Thor wrote:

LL has already stated that setting the bandwidth any higher than 1mbps is of no value.

---

I think you mean:

1 Mbps (Mega bits per second)

not

1 mbps (milli bits per second)

:matte-motes-nerdy:  :smileywink:

---

LOL 

Yes I better know what I meant since I have been a Network Architect for more years than I can count and in my career I have never used nor encountered the term "milli bit per second"  - no such thing in any practical realistiic sense in my I.T. industry since a "bit" is the smallest unit of measure in I.T. and a millionth of a bit doesnt make sense.

As such, in the real world if one does or does not capitalize the first letter in a bandwidth abrev., it generally still is understood to be the same thing.  i.e.  1mbps or 1Mbps is 1 megabit per second.  Technically speaking it would be proper to capitalize the "M" or "K" or "G" under general terms of defining Mega Kilo Giga, but since there is no confusion in our industry with a measure of a "milli bit" - its often not followed.  Call some of us lazy.

Where there is a big practical difference is if the "B" is or is not capitalized".  A "B" = Byte and a "b" = bit.  So, 1Mbps = 1 megabit per sec and 1MBps = 1 megaByte per second.

But forgive me for being lazy.

[Kwakkelde Kwak]

Since we're picking at your posts, milli is a thousandth, not millionth

[Toysoldier Thor]

---

Kwakkelde Kwak wrote:

Since we're picking at your posts, milli is a thousandth, not millionth

---

True.... Ooopsss