Rosedale compares Second Life scaling to Google
Linden Labs CEO Phillip Rosedale makes a bizarre comparison considering Google’s website likely takes more searches in a day than Second Life generates in a year through its antiquated and very bad search technology. He’s not comparing search technology, though, he is comparing the ability of Second Life to scale, via CNET:
Rosedale argued that his company’s architecture mirrors that of the Internet itself, which he characterized as millions of servers running in a decentralized system.
The scaling concerns are echoed by anybody who has been to an event where the sim (a server) starts to lag badly around 75 people. I’ve yet to see anybody from Linden Labs address this part of the scaling issue which is a legitimate and very real concern. They need to get at least a couple hundred players on a server. Yeah, they can keep throwing servers at it, but if each one is only capable of handling 75 players that’s barely going to emulate an IRC channel. If they put three or four sims up against each other then you are talking an event with 300 people. Anybody wanna guess how many Google searches were made in the time it took you to read this article.
These sim scaling issues were apparent during the recent BBC island event. It’s just a matter of time before Linden Labs start being seriously challenged on this issue. 10,000 people couldn’t show up at my house, but they ought to be able to party, if I were to buy one. Not possible from what I’ve seen. Will it ever be that way?
June 6th, 2006 • 
TD Goodliffe • 
pingback | February 19, 2007 at 09:49 | individual pingback-link
[...] Linden Lab finally acknowledging they have some serious scaling problems. Remember Linden Lab CEO Rosedale comparing SL scaling to Google? Scaling is a concern several of our VTOR author group have been concerned about, myself included, [...]
pingback | March 12, 2007 at 04:15 | individual pingback-link
[...] thing I’ve read since following Second Life and Linden Lab was CEO Phillip Rosedale loosely comparing SL scalability to Google. What I’ve never read before until this morning was that there was a well known ceiling of [...]
pingback | July 25, 2007 at 07:06 | individual pingback-link
[...] bolded Mr. Meadows quote because it is in direct contradiction to what Linden Lab CEO Phillip Rosedale claimed over a year ago when he laughingly compared Second Life’s ability to scale to Google. Sure, they can keep [...]