Why are Sl servers and stuff like Land Impact so outdated after all these years ?

[Kei Niosaki]

Ok so Second Life has been running for what  about 13 years now or more? What im wondering is ,is there some reason why LL is still giving us outdated server tech? Like why is a sim only 15000 prims still ? 10 years ago id expect an asnwer like , bandwidth issues for average user an cost of servers to suport it . But now days servers are liek 100 times faster , average user computer is probly 3 times faster an average net connetion is 10x faster. i been to other opensim grids with sims that have up to 40k prims, iv seen stuf like mega regions that are larger ins size then standard sim. So what is holding SL back from giving us updated tech ? Why cant a sim have lets say 30,000 prims nowdays ? severs now days are more then capable of handling it. . just feels like the cost of sl lately not as worth it, eveything else i pay for over last decade has updated its tech but LL seems to be stuck in 2003 still. Yes they gave us Mesh an our avis an clothes an builds had a huge update an look way better then 10 years ago, i give credit for that . but it would be nice if stuff on server end of it would update to todays tech.

[Theresa Tennyson]

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Kei Niosaki wrote:

Ok so Second Life has been running for what  about 13 years now or more? What im wondering is ,is there some reason why LL is still giving us outdated server tech? Like why is a sim only 15000 prims still ? 10 years ago id expect an asnwer like , bandwidth issues for average user an cost of servers to suport it . But now days servers are liek 100 times faster , average user computer is probly 3 times faster an average net connetion is 10x faster. i been to other opensim grids with sims that have up to 40k prims, iv seen stuf like mega regions that are larger ins size then standard sim. So what is holding SL back from giving us updated tech ? Why cant a sim have lets say 30,000 prims nowdays ? severs now days are more then capable of handling it. . just feels like the cost of sl lately not as worth it, eveything else i pay for over last decade has updated its tech but LL seems to be stuck in 2003 still. Yes they gave us Mesh an our avis an clothes an builds had a huge update an look way better then 10 years ago, i give credit for that . but it would be nice if stuff on server end of it would update to todays tech.

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A structural engineer designs things with a "safety factor." In other words, they design things to a load that is only a small percentage of the load that structure should actually fail at.

Land impact is similar. Linden Lab designs in a "load factor" with their 15000 "prims". They're also allowing for that same amount again as temporary prims, and the same amount a third time as items worn by avatars. Basically, the "safety factor" is three. They also have to take into account the fact that a user may be on a region connected to several other regions.

Since OpenSim regions generally have much less avatar load, the owners allow you to place more prims. Basically, they're cutting the safety factor. If the load stays low this isn't a problem. The larger regions are also somewhat of an illusion - they're just the basic region that takes up a larger amount of space while using the same amount of server resources.

Also with new land impact accounting the number of old style prims you can place on a region is already almost doubled, because most prims that have a convex hull shape have a land impact of 0.5. A well-built mesh object of moderate size generally has a land impact much lower than if it were built from prims. You can put much more on a region now than you could previously even though the number of "prims" hasn't changed.

[Nalates Urriah]

Are you assuming the server hardware hasn’t been updated in 13 years? I think about 2 years ago there was a massive hardware upgrade. It wasn’t the first. Every so often I hear about backend services getting new hardware and software. Currrently new voice software is in developement. This is new VoIP tech not available elsewhere.

Are you assuming that server and viewer software has not been upgraded? For the last 2 or 3 years we have been getting a new viewer version about each month with fixes and often new features. The servers get a new package almost every week. For the last year few new features but lots of foxes an improved performance.

Are you assuming the majority of SL users have new hardware? They don’t. An XP user was asking for viewer software just this week. We have a load of Singularity users that don't have enough computer to run Firestorm.

The load on the servers is an interesting topic. 4 or 5 years ago the Lab added mesh. Prior to that most objects in SL were primitives and the mesh matrix for those was built into the viewer as is the classic avatar. That measn no data download for the mesh. Adding what we now call ‘mesh’ made a significant uptick in the data to be downloaded.

Script size and animation size have been increased. Materials were added and that alone almost tripled the possible texture download.

Viewers were upgraded to use point lighting and changed from supporting a few lights to 256… or… I’ve forgotten the upper limit.

What you aren’t seeing is that while the item count on a region hasn’t increased the number of polygons those items can represent has skyrocketed.

Now we are adding more bones and animation possibilities to the avatars: Project Bento.

I suspect the Lindens are counting on Avatar Complexity Reporting to drive down the avatar poly count and increase the demand for low impact clothes and avatar bodies. Freeing up render power to handle the new animations.

You seem to think SL is old tech. Over the last 3 years we have been seeing huge updates to the latest tech. You are just looking at the wrong numbers.

[Qie Niangao]

I'm not at all sure that the 15,000 "prim" limit is much about server load, even though it's enforced server-side. I think, rather, it's more about the overall density of geometry presented to viewers. Second Life sims are very rarely overloaded anymore, but viewers and network bandwidth to those viewers are now the performance bottleneck.

Put another way, if they doubled the prim limit, I think the server-side systems would be just fine, but it would drive away SL users lagged by the content density. It would feel like wading through a crowd of attachment-heavy avatars, even in sims where you're alone.

 

[Prokofy Neva]

Because they have another priority, which is making a new world called Sansar. Google it if you haven't followed it.

[Alwin Alcott]

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Prokofy Neva wrote:

Because they have another priority, which is making a new world called Sansar. Google it if you haven't followed it.

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... sansar is only developed for at most a few years, and since last years there were a lot of changes and updates to SL. If your statement was right there wouldnt be.

[Nova Convair]

In the past there were running 4 sims on a quad core server. Today there are 20-30 sims running on a single multi core server. And this sims are running alot better then the old ones.

So what makes you think there is no progress? LL used the progress mainly to lower their costs though and not to give you more server capacity for free - which is understandable. 

[mikka Luik]

Well in theory I guess the available hardware could be spread thin to meet your wishes but then again thats the beauty of choice with grids is it not? After all, you can get your 40k+ prim sims right now if you like - and join, oh lets pull a figure out of the others perhaps the main known alternative, the other 93 people currently online

Isn't choice wonderful.

[Alwin Alcott]

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mikka Luik wrote:

 lets pull a figure out of the others perhaps the main known alternative, the other 93 people currently online

Isn't choice wonderful.

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Metropolis... current 33 (peek 133, total 24h 364)  ...forbid to use the maps and lets play hide and seek

[Callum Meriman]

15,000 LI is still a lot of vertices for most people to draw. 

The nature of most people is to fill the LI to the brim with frilly things, so you can lay a bet that if the lab allowed 30,000 or even 50,000 LI that people would use it, and that could potentially kill SL for an average user - the sort of person the lab recently added Jellybabies for.

[Kei Niosaki]

for once complaining worked  Yay ! ty LL