Here Comes Second Earth! Or not.

by Alphaville Herald on 11/07/07 at 5:32 am

WTF? 120 Servers (480 new sims) per Week?

MIT’s Technology Review has a (registration required) disappointingly fanboyish, hyperventilating story about Second Life and the possibility of linking up worlds like Second Life with Google Earth. Oddly, while the article talks about how swell and kewl this would be (and includes interviews with developers who live off the hype — Aimee, Sibley, and Reuben – AND includes the obligatory word “mashup”), no one claims to be working on such a mashup and the figures in the article show why:

At one region per server, simulating just the 29.2 percent of the planet’s surface that’s dry land would require 2.3 billion servers and 150 dedicated nuclear power plants to keep them running. It’s the kind of system that “doesn’t scale well,” to use the jargon of information technology.

But what caught my eye was the following passage citing Cory (Ondrejka) Linden:

According to Ondrejka, Linden Lab must purchase and install more than 120 servers every week to keep up with all the new members pouring into Second Life, who increase the computational load by creating new objects and demanding their own slices of land.

Elsewhere, Nelson Minar calls BULLROAR on this:

Let’s reality check that. 120 servers a week is 6000 servers a year, or roughly $25 million a year in hardware expenses alone, not to mention power. I sure hope they’re not actually spending that.

On the bright side, if they ARE expanding that fast they will have enough servers to simulate the land surface of the earth in only 383,333 years! Par-tay! -Uri

25 Responses to “Here Comes Second Earth! Or not.”

  1. Jim Schack

    Jul 11th, 2007

    I believe that they are expanding that fast. Since I’ve been on in October ’06, Magritte was one of the most northern sim now it’s far from it and from the little telehub markers on the map blows my mind compared to what it was back then. Insanity.

    Good article.

  2. Gigs

    Jul 11th, 2007

    There’s only like 5000 simulators total. That means they have 1000 servers or so, once you figure in openspaces.

    I think 12 servers a week is more reasonable. Maybe it was just a typo.

  3. Coincidental Avatar

    Jul 11th, 2007

    “120 servers a week is 6000 servers a year, or roughly $25 million a year in hardware expenses alone, not to mention power. I sure hope they’re not actually spending that.”

    928 islands added in June 2007. I don’t bother to check the increase of land mass, which would tell growth of mainland.

    “On the bright side, if they ARE expanding that fast they will have enough servers to simulate the land surface of the earth in only 383,333 years!”

    In Active Worlds, the size of one of their Worlds, Alphaville, exceeds the size of California.

    [A note to anarchist nuts, Active Worlds resembles most the anarchist society of VRs such as they existed in RL. Anarchist nuts are not going to like Active Worlds.]

    P.S.
    Now SL recession has ended officially too.

  4. Inigo Chamerberlin

    Jul 11th, 2007

    ‘s about time LL realised that their ongoing litany of BS figures do them no credit at all.
    What’s needed is some trustworthy independent auditing of what’s really going on there – not the ravings of someone who’s just shoved a day’s production of Columbia’s most famous export up their nose!

  5. Curious Rousselot

    Jul 11th, 2007

    Cory Linden said (according to the article), “[New users are] creating new objects and demanding their own slices of land”, as the explanation for all the new server.

    So with less than 20% of users having premium accounts, where is the new user demand for slices of land?

    We have also been told that the asset inventory problems are caused because the asset database is a single cluster of MySQL servers that is having real problems scaling any further. So, how is buying more servers going help with that exactly?

    I would really like to be positive here but I don’t understand how Cory’s statements work with the ongoing problems we are experiencing.

  6. shockwave yareach

    Jul 11th, 2007

    This is part of the reason why SL will not become the backbone of the Next Web – it is centralized architecture. The whole reason the internet functions today is because it is DEcentralized, with no single point of failure that can bring down the whole thing. All you have to do is look at the asset server wrong and FOOOM! all of SL is toast.

    When everyone can host their own servers around the world with each server handling its own asset database (and getting the data from other servers as the user tports) and allowing users to have an encrypted backup of their stuff on their own machines, THEN LL may be able to become the next gen webbrowser. Right now they can’t even handle 50,000 users on a video game. How do they expect to be able to handle the 1000x users from the entire internet through their systems?

  7. Prokofy Neva

    Jul 11th, 2007

    I didn’t have the allergenic reaction to this piece you did, Uri, despite the usual allergens present, because I felt it was at least visionary and thoughtful. I still wonder why people will bother with Google earth.

    Gigs, I have no idea why you can claim 5,000 simulators. Look at the economic statistics page. They show 8300 servers. Look at Joe Linden’s tech talk covered by Jeff Barr: he says 12,000 servers. You’re simply out of date, and I don’t get why as you know better. Yes, I understand that multiple simulators can be perched on one server — but you just used the term *simulators* and the Lindens distinctly write 8300 *simulators* in the May economic stats. I wonder what these 4,000 plus secret islands are, they aren’t just the corporate islands, but hidden islands, I guess. A separate source for the figure of some 12,000 is from SL stats which is recording names of sims.

    Because land owners and renters are not just premium accounts, Curious. Island renters don’t need premium accounts. It’s still a valid point to ask, however, as premium account growth has declined, yet number of servers put out has decreased.

    Reason? The chief source of the Lindens’ bottom line is the sale of mainland auction land, typically selling these days for $2400-3000 US, by contrast with islands which sell for a flat $1695. To be sure, island tier is $295 and mainland tier is $195, but still, in the short term the gap is significant, and the job of LL is to push as many sims out as they possibly can.

    They also get the benefit of lowering land prices, and they can cite newbies and socialists on the forums screaming about high land costs as justification for the land glut.

    And that’s fine, because it’s an artificial world. It’s not an authentic economy even in a controlled communist sense that adjusts to demand. The Lindens are not in business to make sure that land barons can keep land prices high; they need to constantly keep them off balance by glutting land so that people a) buy their own land and don’t rent and b) can bypass last month’s unlucky auction winners who still didn’t dump their cut-up white sand and go to less ugly new fresh land of this month’s luckier auction winners.

    It’s such a collossal racket, it’s hard to know why anybody ever plays it. Yet people do, because it’s interesting and brings some margin of profit for the nimble.

  8. SqueezeOne Pow

    Jul 11th, 2007

    This shows me why they will want to be open sourcing the server side fo things. That couldn’t happen until a more modular SL 2.0, though, and they keep growing too fast to be able to take the breather needed to start on such a task…not to mention how understaffed they’ve been for so long. This’ll be a tricky one!

    As far as the constantly expanding land on the grid I think they might be going on one of two concepts…

    1) They want to maintain a certain percentage of land-per-resident. This doesn’t translate well considering the patchwork setup they have now. They’re also probably believing their own numbers.

    2) They figure there’ll be enough land when ther are parcels that go un-owned for a certain period of time. Landbots and thier masters have that covered, though.

    Either way I think they need a RL Real Estate Agent to explain some stuff to them.

    I personally welcome the surge of land because it drives the prices down and they’ve been prohibitively high for a long time. The only affordable spots are in Spamland these days and I think people have made enough money hustling land. It’s time for the rest of us to have our own property.

    And what the hell is a Google Earth??

  9. anonymous

    Jul 11th, 2007

    Its all a conspiracy, between the Lindens, Intlibber, w-hat, the FIC, and all those rich land baron leninists! How dare they free us all from the 2d intehnets!!!

  10. Thraxis Epsilon

    Jul 11th, 2007

    I’m pretty sure Cory was misqouted probably due to the same misconception that many island owners had that 1 SIM equals 1 SERVER.

    And contrary to Prokofy’s belief that Mainland Sims are LL’s bread and butter for their bottom line, they aren’t. Given the current number of Sims, 8539.. roughly 23.34% of that is mainland sims, 1993 sims. Even if every one of those sims were sold at auction today at the prices Prokofy quoted it would only garner between $4,783,206 and $5,979,007.

    In contrast the 6546 private islands, if sold at current prices would garner $10,964,545, roughly twice the income as the Mainland Sims sold at auction.

    This brings us to the monthly income…

    Mainland (I’ll break this up into 3 seperate possibilities):
    If every mainland sim was owned by one person the month income from each would be $195, for the 1993 mainland sims that would garner $388,635 per month, or $4,663,626 a year. Of course this is a “Worst Case” number for mainland.

    If every mainland sim was owned in 2048 blocks, $480 a month per sim, $956,641 per month, $11,479,694 per year (note that this doesn’t account for the free 512 meters that would decrease this ammount by 1/5)

    If every mainland sim was owned in 512 blocks, $640 a month per sim, $1,275,521 per month, $15,306,259 per year (note that this doesn’t account for the free 512 meters that would decrease this amount by 1/2)

    Privat Islands:
    For the 6546 private islands at $295 a month that would be $1,931,069.23 per month, $23,172,830.80 per year.

    Even if we said 1/2 of those sims were grandfathered in from the old cost of $195 a month.

    For $195 per month: $638,234 per month, $7,658,816 per year.
    For $295 per month: $965,534 per month $11,586,415 per year.
    For a total of: $1,603,769 per month $19,245,232 per year.

    So no matter how you slice it, Private Islands are more income to Linden Labs in both the short term, and the long term.

  11. Tenshi Vielle

    Jul 11th, 2007

    Good. ’bout time they expanded more. Hope the land purchase price drops.

  12. Obscure Doodad

    Jul 11th, 2007

    Yeah, I have some problem with these numbers, too. The June Econ stats are out and it’s bad news for the top end money people. In fact, have a good look at that monthly linden flow. It is half their quoted 80K premiums — who get a GUARANTEED stipend influx (and those numbers Meta Linden publishes are all BEFORE Linden fees (like tier or monthly premium payments).

    Fully 1/2 of people with GUARANTEED income per month can’t make money in SL. Of course, many don’t try. Many just take their stipend and spend it for fun. Maybe.

    But this sim total stuff is weird. First, it is my understanding that about 4 sims reside in one server CPU. Not 1:1. Evidence of that is here:

    http://neighbours.maxcase.info/index.php

    . . . and that site suggests about 11,000 sims. At 4:1 that is 2750ish server boxes. Don’t know if they exclude secret corporate islands.

    The cost what? About $3,000 each? That’s 8.25 million dollars in server assets on hand depreciating every day. A typical rule of thumb for annual replacement is between 1/4 and 1/3, so LL will be looking at $2.75 million per year in just maintenance costs.

    80K premiums at $85/yr is $6.8 million revenue. Tier on 11,000 sims at call it an average of $200/sim/month is $26.4 million. June’s stats show $466K USD brought in via LL’s auction process and X 12 that would be $5.5 million per year.

    So a tentative low end estimate of LL annual revenue of 35-40ish million dollars is probably in the ballpark. I recall a quote of 200 employees. At $150K (with benefits)average per person that is 30 million dollars in payroll.

    Utilities on the building, legal fees (of which they will endure many in days to come), new servers, maintenance of about $3 million per year on rolling replacements (replace all every 3 yrs), building insurance, lease costs or mortgage interest . . . personally it looks bad to me. They don’t have a lot of variable costs. It is all fixed. If people abandon land, and it doesn’t generate tier, they still have to endure depreciation/ageing on that server box.

  13. Cocoanut Koala

    Jul 11th, 2007

    Yay! I’m nimble!

    coco

  14. Prokofy Neva

    Jul 11th, 2007

    >yet number of servers put out has decreased.

    *has NOT decreased

  15. Prokofy Neva

    Jul 11th, 2007

    >This is part of the reason why SL will not become the backbone of the Next Web – it is centralized architecture. The whole reason the internet functions today is because it is DEcentralized, with no single point of failure that can bring down the whole thing. All you have to do is look at the asset server wrong and FOOOM! all of SL is toast.

    >When everyone can host their own servers around the world with each server handling its own asset database (and getting the data from other servers as the user tports) and allowing users to have an encrypted backup of their stuff on their own machines, THEN LL may be able to become the next gen webbrowser. Right now they can’t even handle 50,000 users on a video game. How do they expect to be able to handle the 1000x users from the entire internet through their systems?

    I’m really tired of hearing this rigid, hidebound orthodoxy.

    Who’s to say that decentralized is better, if it means scores of coder tyrants with fiefdoms and legions of destructive griefing script-kiddies playing with OS?

    There’s something to be said for larger proprietary concerns that have a responsible attitude to their own bottom line, which helps them, in theory, care about others’ bottom line, too, upon whom they depend. The history of Linden Lab, if someone will ever tell it accurately, will involve admitting that their revolutionary excesses had to modify on the sharp rocks of consumer demand and demand for corporate responsibility.

    The idea that all users are geeks who want or need to have their own encrypted data on their own hard-drives, who want or need to have the capacity to build or script offline, etc. is oe of the enduring fallacies of the tekkie-wiki class. 8 million people playing World of Warcraft can’t be wrong; people worlds, and worlds that are manicured and cared for and keep their stuff for them.

    It’s a shocking concept, I realize, for the tekkie whose mindset is firmly locked into the paradigmn of endlessly making everybody’s labor free and making products free (not only, “We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us,” of the old USSR, but “We work for free and steal everything of theirs”.

    “Everyone” isn’t going to drop $8000-$10,000 who-knows-how-much to host their own server — nothing of the sort is going to be happening. It’s one of the idiocies of Web 1.0 and early 2.0 gurus that they can’t drop these memes and archetypes like “AOL is a dinosaur” “walled gardens can’t work” etc — when in fact time and again, large numbers of people demonstrate that they WANT walled gardens because of their predictability, security, and consistency.

    The future lies somewhere beyond these extremes constantly advocated by the open source zealots. Companies will use a mixtuer of OS and proprietary software and design. They will install and hold value by embracing capitalistic private property, not making a goddamn cyber subbotnik with socialism prevailing everywhere. For awhile, rich people on the left in foundations might pay for the subbotnik, but they’ll run out of money — this is big stuff, costly, needs a lot of work and equipment, and business models that *pay for it* are needed.

  16. urizenus

    Jul 11th, 2007

    per some of the comments above, the author of the article does not seem to be confused about the 1 server:4 sim ratio. As per this quote:

    “According to Ondrejka, Linden Lab must purchase and install more than 120 servers every week to keep up with all the new members pouring into Second Life, who increase the computational load by creating new objects and demanding their own slices of land. Each server at Linden Lab supports one to four “regions,” 65,536-square-meter chunks of the Second Life environment–establishing the base topography, storing and rendering all inanimate objects, animating avatars, running scripts, and the like.”

  17. StallionSeven

    Jul 11th, 2007

    One wonders if Uri has inquired of Cory about the discrepancy.

    Also, I truly enjoy uninformed posts like shockwave and Squeezeone make. Both are assuming that SL isn’t upgrading their architecture, that it can’t be upgraded.

    Uh, that’s what Zero Linden has been doing for months. Try and keep up.

  18. Anonymous

    Jul 11th, 2007

    Prok:

    As you loathe LL, their Techie FIC evil masterminds and their sharks with the friggin lasers on their heads, you of all people should know that centralization puts all the power of the system in a very small number of hands. Decentralized servers all over the world are how the internet works today. It was built on top of the backbone designed to survive nuclear attack. So yeah, I’d say an approach which survives a nuclear exchange is superior to one that crashes anytime someone farts near the asset server.

    SL2.0 will likely be one that servers all over the world can run. It will likely have encrypted interfaces between all servers, eliminating the danger of ripping off scripts and code by your FIC in their homes. It will also eliminate the hazard of scriptkiddies throwing random garbage at other servers in an effort to crash the sim, since no packets between servers will be accepted if they fail the encryption check. This is very basic stuff to us tech folks, Prok. So don’t think that just because Foxiecakes can have a server in her apartment one day that she’ll have access to every bit and byte that it exchanges with other servers.

  19. Coincidental Avatar

    Jul 12th, 2007

    Basically one CPU simulates one sim/region. Thus, if there is a 4-core server, it simulates four sims/regions, I guess. And then somebody mixes the number of cores/sims/servers and it explains nicely Linden Lab numbers.

    “$8000-$10,000 who-knows-how-much to host their own server”

    Just divide by ten to get the today’s price. A home desktop could do the job, but maybe the upstream link to the internet should be expanded somewhat :-)

    “That’s 8.25 million dollars in server assets on hand depreciating every day.”

    That’s why they charge monthly fees.

    “… these extremes constantly advocated by the open source zealots. Companies will use a mixtuer of OS and proprietary software and design. They will install and hold value by embracing capitalistic private property”

    Often open source development is done on paid time based on a commercial project.

    For most of the public and even programmers the open source is equally cryptic as open binary (free download). Or the open source is more cryptic when you have to compile it yourself to a binary.

    And I think that Second Lie&Heresy is a completely wrong forum to credibly whine about open source by a contributor. At least my version of Second Lie&Hearsay is open source (no registration or fee required, read at your own risk, users develop the content further by filing good-for-nothing FBI reports).

    [Capitalists killed the capitalism in the USA over 100 years ago. Go for example to Russia to experience neo-capitalism.]

  20. Cocoanut Koala

    Jul 12th, 2007

    I think you way overestimated that payroll there, Obscure.

    coco

  21. janeforyou Barbara

    Jul 13th, 2007

    Hold on to your hats…. next yare this time you will se bout 25.000 Islands and 25 mill ” members” in SL…you will se 200.000 users online at primetime.
    Last yare at this time i posted : 5000 islands and 5 mill members and 40.000 users on primetime in July 2007… i guess i missed a lill :-)
    Its just a matter of pure math!

  22. Anonymous

    Jul 14th, 2007

    Well, 8300 simulators is still only 1660 servers or so. I’m making the conservative assumption they are 5:1 on average. Openspace server have 16 simulators running on them, and Class 3 have 2 simulators (IIRC). I figure this averages to about 5:1. It may very well be 6:1 or so just as easily… there’s a lot of openspaces out there.

    From that economic’s stat pages, that is only islands. Mainland is probably another 1200 servers (4800 regions) or so.

    So what… we got a little less than 3000 servers total. There’s no way they are adding 120 servers a week.

    Now, what they HAVE been doing is replacing Class 3 mainland with class 5. So for a few weeks they may very well have brought in 120 servers a week, but when they didn’t mention is that they were decommissioning 100 Class 3 servers those same weeks.

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