More Mono details for SL Scripters

A good MySQL AB interview with Ian Wilkes director of operations at Second Life reveals a number of interesting current technical facts and statistics about SL. There are 70 full time employees keeping the virtual world. A busy day peaks at 5,000-5,500 residents of the 140,000+ SL residents and the logged in number drops to around 2,000 in the early morning PST hours. SL runs on 1,100 servers with about 2,000 CPUs.

To revisit Forser’s earlier post on Mono, the interview gives more details:

Lenz: You mean Mono as a replacement of the current scripting language, or as an alternative? That’s surely sounds like a big step.

Ian: As a replacement. But, we’ll keep the current engine around to run old content – I just don’t think we’ll allow new scripts to be compiled for it. But, I mean, from a scripter’s perspective it shouldn’t be that big a deal as we’ll still support LSL - we’ll just compile it to the CLI (Common Language Infrastructure). So, essentially, you’ll be able to compile scripts that run a lot faster and have more memory available. And we’ll have more flexibility for adding new scripting features.

Wonder what “new scripting features” will be added for scripters? The fact that they will be supporting backwards compatibility is encouraging, otherwise there would be a lot of broken programs.

And check out the MySQL database size specs for Second Life:

Ian: The central DB has about 200M rows in it, the logging DB has about 300M and each of the user databases, of which there are currently 3, has about 50M rows.

Wow, nearly half a billion rows worth of data powering the 140,000+ SL residents and sim activity.