SL's Top 50 Sims for 11/11: Only 10 New Entries from October (I.E., Why SL Sims Should Have a Download Option)

Courtesy Louis Platini's Metaverse Business, a Second Life/OpenSim analytics company that gathers publicly accessible in-world data for its clients, here's the top 50 most popular sims in Second Life for November 2011, listed according their average visitor count, the unique visitor range at any given period, and the sim's rank the previous month. As is usually the case, the top 50 list is relatively stable from the previous month, with only ten new entries to the top 50. (Though not necessarily new sims.) Here's the top 25:

If you compare this list to last month's top 50, or a random month from 2011, like May, you'll see many or most of the same sims, regulars like Brasil Sul, the jazz club Frank's Place 2, and, of course, that inexplicable standby, Bukkake Bliss Island. Which raises an important point we discussed last week:

If many or even most regular SL users stay in the same place when they come to Second Life (which seems to be true), and the architecture to most of these popular places rarely change in any significant way (which also seems to be the case), why not introduce SL regions which come with a download option, to reduce lag and other performance problems?>

More on that later. Meantime, click to see top sims 26 through 50:

Comments

[Ignatius Onomatopoeia]

You gotta hand it to Bukkake Bliss: they have won the smack-down on names:

http://www.quickmeme.com/meme/35fi69/

[Anonymous coward]

It's worth noting that because of the way SL is setup, it's perfectly possible to setup such a download feature yourself.. I have SQUID running on my PC and it caches everything that's sent from secondlife.. because textures never change. the cache is permanent and load on the network is reduced to practically nothing.

[Dale Innis]

The SL viewer is *supposed* to have an automatic version of that 'download option', in the form of the cache. Anything that you visit often should end up cached, and should therefore not have to be downloaded again.

But no SL viewer that I know of has ever had a halfway-decent cache. I gather that they are all based on the original one, and the original one was a rather awful mess, so intimately entwined with the rest of the code that it's never been cleanly excised so that it could be replaced with something that actually worked.

Personally I think it would be better to put the effort into making the cache work right, rather than implementing what would basically be a manual cache in the form of a download option. But either one would be an improvement, for sure...

[Arcadia Codesmith]

Why not both? Beef up the existing cache algorithm, and give us the option to pre-cache static sim features before we travel.

BTW, Iggy -- niiiiiiice :)

[Iris Ophelia]

Although I'd bet that more than half of those places have a mall area with regular turnover of products/renters using those spaces, I'm wondering if that wouldn't throw a wrench into all this. :\

[Nightbird Glineux]

Iris, Squid should have some way to delete old, unused textures. Or not; disk space is cheap these days, and faster than most people's internet access.

[Nightbird Glineux]

@Anonymous, the more I think about your idea, the more I like it.

The SL Wiki has this: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/SLSquid_Proxy

Are you doing anything differently? What is the size of your cache? I'm thinking of using 16GB on an SSD.