Does anyone know the real truth behind Second Life Servers?

[Coffee Pancake]

9 minutes ago, Paulsian said:

i under estimated amazon with selling books online what if this turning into an amazon experience. that would be sick.

[MarissaOrloff]

14 hours ago, bigmoe Whitfield said:

I'm not able to show the aws tool I use, but my backbone (I'm in a dc close to the aws site in oregon and inside aws site themselves with hosting)

but I'm seeing 3 links down right now, so there is some routing issues currently, but that changes day to day, hour to hour.

There isn't a routing issue on that trace it's just filtered once it goes to AWS and that is very common. 

[Coffee Pancake]

1 hour ago, MarissaOrloff said:

There isn't a routing issue on that trace it's just filtered once it goes to AWS and that is very common. 

It's not uncommon to find hosts further down the line who just don't care for ICMP traffic at all.

[Exavor Diesel]

On 5/16/2022 at 6:12 PM, Lord Derryth said:

Misinformation, as I have run numerous tests on all viewers.  Alchemy was the preferred viewer for less lag.  Upon gathering information, it's been said; Alchemy utilizes the GPU more over CPU.  This is why the viewer offers more FPS and eliminates some of the lag.  Firestorm was by far the worst viewer when it came to lag despite the average FPS.  The Second Life viewer is literally nonexistent since textures take forever to load and lacks features that are QoL like Animation Overrider which is essential in eliminating extra huds that kill FPS and causes more lag.  

We were told that moving up to the cloud would make things easier, faster and more reliable.  Unfortunately, that has become false, and we are seeing far worse lag than we did before.  There needs to be an explanation as to why there will be days of perfection as if my sim server is in my home running on my network and then most of the time the server feels it's on planet Pluto.  One of my friends that worked as real estate agent said, "We received a memo stating prices may drop once we go to the cloud."  What happened, why didn't the prices drop?  Is it because of inflation and they are abusing the customer/user by keeping the prices high while paying less for servers?

Again, I appreciate the trolls not chiming in with comments about not getting a sim or leaving it for business.  I use a sim for pleasure, and I enjoy building urban city.  It's come to a point where $300 is not worth spending on a sim that is in constant lag and can barely hold more than 10 people with low script count.  In the end, it always comes down to "wow, you have a lot of scripts running, that's your problem."  Why can't it ever be, "Well, SL is old, the coding is old and nothing will ever work."?

I guess you did not endure mainland prior to the move to the cloud? Sim crossings were painful. They're still not seamless but gone are the days when you'd find yourself constantly flying uncontrollably across sims as soon as you cross a border. SL has come a long way since then, in part due to the move to the cloud. 

The hardware is better but that doesn't mean everything else stands still. We now have higher resolution textures, more complex avatars, more detailed mesh designs and that's just to name a few - oftentimes these are not optimised to meet end-user hardware limitations. 

Imo the weakest link is end-user hardware, more often than not. A lot of people still run SL on non-gaming spec computer hardware. Of course they're going to suffer with lag if they do not keep their settings low. I brought this up before only be told "SL is not a game!" -- try telling your computer that! I have a 2 year old mid-spec gaming laptop and I think it's fair to say SL gives it a good spanking. Even in the depths of winter, I can turn off my radiator because my laptop is sufficient to keep my room heated. The weakest link is probably not AWS infrastructure. 

Edited May 22, 2022 by Exavor Diesel

[bigmoe Whitfield]

7 hours ago, MarissaOrloff said:

There isn't a routing issue on that trace it's just filtered once it goes to AWS and that is very common. 

I was showing a routing issue lol. 

[Ardy Lay]

19 hours ago, bigmoe Whitfield said:

I was showing a routing issue lol. 

There is always a "routing issue" somewhere.  It still amazes me how many changes a day our routers in the default-free zone see.

Trying to trace packet flows through the Internet is dangerous business.  Many transport networks consist of meshes of MPLS tag switches where there is no one best path from one point to another.

And remember, "traceroute" sends packets with the Time To Live IP header value set incrementally from 1 to 30 or more.  By plotting the locations of the routers that report "time-to-live expired in transit" we can get some clue about the path our packets are taking to a specified destination, however, it gives us no data about the return path, which is often more important to the user running traceroute utilities.

[Jules Catlyn]

On 5/19/2022 at 6:27 PM, Lord Derryth said:

That's why I said there needs to be an investigation.  I think they're scamming everyone.  A memo went out notifying the real estates that prices would drop by 50%.  They figured if they keep it in the dark, they make more money.  Something is not right with Second Life.

People are countering your argument and all you do is dismiss them. The comment i quoted makes me wonder if this is truly about the performance of your region or about the (supposed) drop in sim prices that did not go through. 

[Ardy Lay]

On 5/19/2022 at 11:27 AM, Lord Derryth said:

A memo went out notifying the real estates that prices would drop by 50%.

Really?  I wanna see this memo!    Who received this memo?  Who sent it?

[Hucasys Jacobus]

On 5/16/2022 at 12:26 PM, Coffee Pancake said:

 

Also also .. All viewers, ALL VIEWERS are built upon the same code from LL and function fundamentally the same way. We fiddle around the edges and improve things we feel are important, but we can't stray too far from the Linden viewer .. or adding updates from LL becomes an impossible amount of work and stuff just breaks.

Some viewer projects really like to talk up the magic their project accomplishes ... don't buy the hype. Alchemy stomps on your CPU in all the same ways as every other viewer, maybe more! Always have the linden viewer in your arsenal of test viewers.

 

 

Hi all, I know this is an ancient post that I ran into but, being April 2024 I would like to comment, for anyone who might also land here, that at least for me, changing from FS to Alchemy made a HUGE difference, I was lagging badly at some places making it actually impossible to interact, all I can say, as hard facts, is that Alchemy literally doubled (x2) my FPS and made my Second Life much much happier! My PC is average btw and it does crash sometimes if I am doing too much other stuff while on SL. 

[Qie Niangao]

On 4/12/2024 at 4:37 PM, Hucasys Jacobus said:

at least for me, changing from FS to Alchemy made a HUGE difference

Coincidentally I too recently found Alchemy making a huge difference, discovering that it somehow cured a problem that has plagued me for months: very frequent system dialogs that "SLPlugin.exe has stopped working" that make both Firestorm and the Linden viewer unusable. (I reported it ages ago. No change through generations of updates including Friday's 7.1.6.8632452945.)

I realize it's not exactly the point of the thread (and nothing to do with framerate either); just another case of Alchemy unexpectedly coming to the rescue.

[VenKellie]

ok i just quickly scrolled through this thread.

LL's overhead cost is more then what they pay for AWS.
Theres employee's to pay that do all the techy work to improve and keep the regions online
other services like FreshDesk for support tickets, Canney for feedback
Im sure vivox is charging to use their voice system.

So their overhead is high im assuming so where else they going to get the money to cover costs?
Yes LL can cut down abit like make their own support ticket system, i'd write it all for just $500 USD
But FreshDesk is pretty awesome to use.
Not sure about Canney or what Microsoft is charging to use Github for bug reports but i know JIRA is expensive.

And as i always say about other games that has microtransaction stores. Dev's gotta eat too.

Hope that helps to understand why region rentals are expensive in SL compared to other virtual worlds.

In short, LL charges alot per region due to overhead costs including AWS fees.

Edited April 14 by VenKellie