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Looking Inside the Second Life Data Centers
An anonymous reader writes "InformationWeek looks inside the data centers that power the game Second Life. Tidbits from the article: The software architecture is an extension of the virtual world metaphor of Second Life. At any time, it's possible to walk into one of Second Life's two data centers, pat one of the rack-mounted servers, and say that particular server is running virtual New York, or San Francisco, or ancient Rome, and imagine itty-bitty people and buildings inside the 1U rack-mounted servers.
Linden Lab, which develops and maintains Second Life, runs 2,000 Intel- and AMD-based servers in two co-location facilities in San Francisco and Dallas. And, contrary to widespread belief among Second Life users, Linden Lab has not decided whether to open-source the Second Life server software."
"Linden Lab has not decided whether to open-source the Second Life server software."
I dont think it matters too much, the opensim project has been making amazing strides using the BSD licensed libsecondlife code as a base. http://openmetaverse.org/wiki/OpenSim
#!/bin/csh cat $0
I'm not too into server architecture, but it sounds like it's a good system to me. Could someone explain why this is so "new" or different?
--Thomas J. Owens
Second Life isn't a game, it's an advertising medium. Nothing more.
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PGP Key ID 0xCB8FF658
I think, instead of using Second Life as a base, they should have started from scratch and fixed some of the 'issues' with Second Life.
You can't use anything but primitives. Making a non-simple object often requires more polys and ingenuity than it should. A cowboy hat, for example.
Proprietary scripting language. Going with Lua (more popular) or Ruby (my choice) would not only be easier to use, but would also let budding geeks learn a good language. SL is implementing .NET, if I remember correctly, though. Not bad as a third choice.
Texture maps, shaders, etc, etc. SL supports no advanced graphical features.
I'm sure someone will say 'get off yer lazy butt and do it yourself', but it's obviously not that easy. I don't have the time, money, or skill to create an entire virtual 3D world that is user-scriptable. And gathering a team of those who DO have those things is tough on a from-scratch project.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
At any time, it's possible to walk into one of Second Life's two data centers, pat one of the rack-mounted servers, and say that particular server is running virtual New York, or San Francisco, or ancient Rome, and imagine itty-bitty people and buildings inside the 1U rack-mounted servers.
"No...I don't believe it...let me out! I want out!"
There's that thunderous "pat-pat-pat" from the heavens again...time to sacrifice more AOL CDs...
-- www.globaltics.net
Political discussion for a new world
Why do all of these "inside the data center of ..." never have pictures? Everyone knows geeks needs something to drool over and fantasize with.
It works, up to a point but it is extremely limited.
If you read the article you will have noted that an area in the game is run on a single processor. That makes it fairly simple to grow, more areas == more servers.
But it is a bit like handling multi-tasking on your PC by adding more cores for every task. Run your OS, 1 cure, run a music player another core, run a game, another core, run a virus scanner, another core.
This is NOT the way things are done and for three reasons.
First it is wastefull, an empty area (no players) would still be using a full processor, granted probably a light one but it would be like having one Pentium4 cpu dedicated to running your mp3 player, even the cheapest available is going to be overkill.
Second it is limited, you can only use 1 cpu and they are still limited in how fast you can go, worse each speed increase is going to cost you more and more. So an area with lots of visitors will be unable to scale.
Last is that areas are seperated, you have to move from cpu to cpu as you move areas, this means transferring a lot of data even if you go from one desolate area to another.
Imagine if an ISP had every website on a single CPU box and that is the only option. Wastefull for small sites, not powerfull enough for large sites and a nightmare to administrate.
So why did they do it?
Well, it is relativly simple to setup. You don't need loadbalancing for instance or dynamic scaling. Customer simply buys a server space from you and that is the their server. It should in theory also be fairly robust, one cpu/server crashing won't really affect all the others. In a cluster setup one bit going down CAN (doesn't have to but it seems like it in MMORPG terms) take everything with it.
it is also cheap, they can use stock hardware buyable from any cheap box maker. Blizzard and Sony had to cough up some serious cash long before they could even open their game to get their servers running.
It is the reason why today the majority of hosting providers still work with crappy intel/amd boxes and not virtual servers on proper sun/ibm or some such hardware. It is cheap and you can get started with just one desktop PC (I seen server farms that had racks specially designed to house desktops, not racks).
More traditional setups for MMO's are to have clusters, each cluster is made up of a combination of hardware setup to serve a particular area. The advantage here is that you can more easily upgrade a cluster to handle a bigger load from an area. There are limits but more or less you can simply plug in more hardware to handle a high load. Offcourse such hardware is going to cost you.
The software for it is more complex to build and in all it is just more costly BUT in the long run more flexible.
Linden Labs had (still doesn't) have anywhere near the resources of a SOE or Blizzard. Their system worked for them but by now they are feeling the pinch as some areas just can't handle the load.
Their advantage is that customers themselves pay for the servers directly, so anyone with an underused area is wasting their own money, not Linden Labs. Same as when you buy a dedicated super server to serve you knitting club photo's. Your money your waste.
By the way, the above is based on an extremely old in depth article, it could well be that nowadays a sim (area) can use more then 1 cpu, but back in the day it couldn't
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Second Life servers run Debian and use MySQL. They are transitioning to use Mono as a scripting language (from their own scripting language, which apparently isn't working out so well).
Which is nice. However, not open-sourcing their server code is somewhat disappointing. Oh well, at least the client is open, someone else can create a FOSS server if the interest ever arises.
"At any time, it's possible to walk into one of Second Life's two data centers, pat one of the rack-mounted servers, and say that particular server is running virtual New York, or San Francisco, or ancient Rome"
The Second Life world is devastated by earthquakes with epicentres in New York, San Francisco, and Ancient Rome.
Am I the only one that reads these titles that say "A peak inside X's datacenter" and go "OMG Datacenter pics!!!!!!"? Only to be disappointed by a text article with no pics? I DEMAND MY SERVER PR0N!
Can all fish swim?
That's the sound of the joke flying over your head. Able Mellowvision? Come on, think for half a second before you respond to a post.
I did try Second Life, I wanted to try if I could have something similar to a web page into the virtual world.
I discovered that land price is artificially high, what happens is that "landlords" buy "islands" and then resell small plots at high margin.
Let me do a few calculations (correct me if any of the assumptions are wrong)
Current land costs ten time as much as that, at least, and you find weird plots or space for rent ant HIGH prices (compared with the cost of servers). This seems to me a scam, I have even blogged about it, hoping that someone notices.
I did write to Linden about it, but I have yet to receive a reply [rt.lindenlab.com #631998], what irritates me is that current policy just makes Landlords rich doing basically nothing, it does not seems fair at all to me.
Regarding my original plan, I have realized that it is not enough to have a "shop" there, you also have to staff it. So, the cost of having a shop in second life is way more that a website !
"what irritates me is that current policy just makes Landlords rich doing basically nothing, it does not seems fair at all to me"
:-)
You've never rented a property in real life, right?
How is this is different from real life?
Welcome to free market capitalism. You got something other people want, you shunt the price as high as you can.
Assumption is mostly correct, except with one thing, you're not really paying 70 dollars, you're paying almost nothing. Shortly, most of what you pay actually pays for your stipend, as if you were regularly buying it at the Linden Exchange. So you can recover most of that.
As a fairly old resident, I keep my L$500/week stipend for my premium account, which earns me about $16 a year. It can't get much better than having the company paying you instead of the other way. In fact, I wrote that blog entry because I was tired of all the complaints due to stipend reduction. They were needed, or it wouldn't make sense to have premium accounts in the first place.
Over the last week I've taken my fifth visit to SL since it began. Although the interface has changed a smidgen, and there are now partially fleshed out tutorials nothing has really changed.
:)
Avatars still look like very old Poser characters. Animations for things as simple as walking are poorly done. People look like skittering wind up toys.
Performance is very, very poor, as always. Moving even a couple of virtual feet triggers up to several minutes of lag while thousands of objects load, usually in teeny bite size primitives.
And as usual, within a couple of minutes leaving the tutorial area I was hopelessly lost and unable to find anyone to talk to.
Second Life has always been nothing more than an experiment in marketing. I don't understand how anyone could possibly spend more than a short while in there before becoming completely frustrated with the hideous performance.
"At any time, it's possible to walk into one of Second Life's two data centers, pat one of the rack-mounted servers..."
Who says they'll stop at patting? What if they cripple the servers?! It sounds like Linden need to hire some security.
(Virtual) reality bites
(Not sure if that's the same title used on the dead tree version I read this morning.)One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
is wyoming running on a 386 in a closet somewhere then?
There's that thunderous "pat-pat-pat" from the heavens again... time to have sex with that diaper wearing cat again.
All they mention is that they have 34TB of storage... Is this locally attached / internal disk? NFS? SAN? FibreChannel? iSCSI?
Storage... it aint sexy but you know you want it...
What a phenomenal waste of electricity. How many kilotons of coal does it take to power this pig? I just hope we can all move into 2nd life when our own planet starts writhing around.
CommentBot 0.7a running with args "-module irritate,disagree -target random"
Yes you are quite correct. Second life's land system is indeed pretty BS. The price SL charges for land has absolutely no relation to the costs involved in running the server that handles that land. It's purely a monopoly situation where they've been pulling in money for doing just about nothing. To be frank I was stupified when I heard they open sourced the client but it seems libsecondlife was forcing them to do that anyways.
The question at this point is whether Linden Labs will adapt to a market where they will lose their monopoly or if they will just keep clinging till it all falls apart.
I took a Second Life class (Advanced Land Management taught by Shippou Oud) recently. He stated that currently there are up to five sims (aka regions or logical servers) running on each box (physical server machine). He also mentioned that buying a private island isnt the best way to reduce lag because your response time can depend heavily on whatever other regions are on the same machine with you.
For the rhyme impaired: Able Mellowvision = Cable Television
Tell me their data center is on the 13th Floor. =)
FTA: Avatars near the edge of one sim need to be able to look over and see activity in the next sim, just like people in the real world can see activity going on in the next lot of land.
What would happen if everyone moves their avatar to the edge of an area and look towards another area? Would this bring down the communication between the two servers?