Second Life 100,000 simultaneous user ceiling approaching
I’ve seen lots of articles complaining about Second Life scaling woes and even written a couple posts here at VTOR complaining about the lack of it myself. 
Probably the strangest 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 simultaneous users online with the current architecture.
To help deal with current and future growth, Linden Lab is looking to redesign the network. The current capacity is 100,000 simultaneous sessions, and Linden Lab is looking to increase that capacity to 10s of millions of simultaneous logins. Linden Lab also needs to manage that upgrade without interrupting service to existing users.“We’re swapping engines out at 40,000 feet while still flying,” said Joe Miller, VP of platform and technology development for Linden Lab.
Assuming the article isn’t fiction (doesn’t appear to be) there we have it. On Sunday, there were 36,000 residents online at one point, which makes for easy math: 36%. Let’s hope that Linden Lab’s goal of reaching 10s of millions arrives soon.
March 12th, 2007 • 
TD Goodliffe • 
comment | March 13, 2007 at 11:31 | individual comment-link
There’s always a ceiling, even if you don’t know about it. Computers are finite beings.
SL - or any persistent, interactive world - will have problems with holding persistent connections to people more than something that has connection times measured in miliseconds. The more data and persistency you have (a moving avatar and streaming data is really the highest point right now) the less users total you will be able to manage.
But they’re switching (as we speak it’s been rolled out in stages) to more and more data not going down the persistent connections but down http fetches and such.
Of course, for every ‘my event crashed!’ there is, there were another hundred, or thousand, users who didn’t even notice a hiccup.
comment | March 13, 2007 at 11:51 | individual comment-link
Of course, Crissa, but that’s what Phillip should have been saying a year ago. Only now does this come up, somewhat conveniently or inconveniently depending on one’s perspective, when it’s clear that SL is buckling under the load.
comment | March 23, 2007 at 02:45 | individual comment-link
It always seems to me like LL is playing prevent defense before they’ve scored. Worry about tens of thousands of users after you can deliver service to a mere thirty thousand. I’m all for planning for the future, but could we maybe fix a few things before we get there? SL is crashing and acting strangely every day and, trust me, plenty of people are noticing the hiccups - especially business owners who an inundated with the side effects of those hiccups. Vendors are acting strangely, SIMs are crashing all the time, people’s inventory items are disappearing - the list is endless. Yes, computers are finite, as is the time you can devote for programming resources and the fact is that many of us would prefer to see a lot more programming focused now on fixing what’s regularly breaking down rather than the millions of future users that don’t exist yet and will not exist for a practical amount of time.