Living in the Metaverse

Just few days ago I read a rant about new architecture of the Second Life servers announced at official blog:

Additional internal web service infrastructure work to remove dependencies on central databases (initially disabled, we’ll then slowly start flipping services on). In translation, network under the grid will not be centralized anymore. 

Not that this is not bad as aforementioned rant is suggesting. It is good. Instead of having a central asset database that will serve all the grid, all of the 50.000 residents active at the same time, that huge job of distributing data will be divided on thousands of smaller servers, those that "hold" sims as well. But let's go a bit under the hood. It won't be painful, I promise.

You log on the sim. Things are starting to rezz from nothing. First you don't see them, then they are gray, then get some textures over them. Avatars start to appear. First ruthed, then shaped but gray, then in their full beauty. While we are waiting, sim server is contacting a big nasty thing called asset server and asking data for each object, its shape, position, script, texture, everything. Then the sim server gives it to your client so it can draw it.

With the change in architecture that is in front of us it should be pretty much the same, except for those big asset monsters. They are to be kicked out. So where our textures will come from? From the sims themselves. Many of them.

Why this is good? Because if you have many smaller servers instead of two big clusters, you are less likely to have a bottleneck. Just imagine how many data is flowing in and out the entry point of the asset servers. How many textures are requested for at each second of vivid life of the grid. No matter how big and fast and great those servers are, they are stuck most of the time. And you feel it. Each time when your beloved avatar is gray, there is a texture request somewhere in some buffer waiting its turn to be accessed. And we are not talking just about textures. We are talking about everything. Yes, everything we see, hear and interact with in second life. All the thousands and millions of us.

So, it was inevitable to give the monsters a bit of rest and reorganize things a bit. Instead of everything calling the same cluster for data, everything will now call all the thousands of sims, each keeping a bit of the world. One good thing that comes to mind is that, probably, objects created on a particular sim will be stored right there, on that sim. So you won't wait for it to come over seven seas. It will be right there. And even the things that will be stored elsewhere, the waiting line will be much shorter. It is not the same as P2P model I wished for, a year ago, but it is still much better than having all the world packed in one place.

There is one more thing. Second life as a platform is at the crossroad point. If it is not to be world for itself, a ghetto, a nice toy for a bunch of enthusiasts it has to open itself. OpenSim is already here, demands for interoperability are louder and louder. Soon enough, there will be no place for centralised platform that tends to stay closed in itself. In less than a year, we hope, there will be a whole world out of Linden Lab's. And if Linden Lab wants to stay a part of that world, it has to make a system that will communicate with the rest. Decentralizing the network might be an important step towards that goal.

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