Open Tech Forum: How Can Second Life's Performance Get Fundamentally Improved?

During his in-world strategy update, Philip Rosedale said Linden Lab's first priority under his interim CEO management is "a big attack on lag and crashes, clearly things that very negatively impact all users." I've been thinking about that a lot, especially in the wake of Chris Pirillo's honest assessment of how much Second Life lag exists.

I'm far from an expert, but it seems like some significant level of lag is an essential, unavoidable aspect of a system architected to deliver fully streamed 3D content that changes in real time, from the hundred millions of items of 3D content, to the tens of thousands of concurrent users who are represented by 3D avatars. (To be sure, all 3D MMOs have some level of lag as well, but most of them greatly minimize the problem by putting the bulk of the world's 3D assets on users' hard drives, instead of streaming it.) So barring some major systemic change to the very nature of Second Life, such as going into the cloud, I'm not sure if lag is ever going away. But again, these issues aren't my expertise, so I put this to the many NWN readers know much more. Can most Second Life lag be eliminated without having to start from scratch, infrastructure-wise, and if so, how?

Comments

[Nexii Malthus]

Sure, give tools to content creators that can analyze the cost of assets, be it geometry, textures, animations, sounds, etc.

Once we have the tools that can give us the raw facts about being able to test the performance cost of content in near real time, then we'll be able to provide an evolutionary incentive for efficient products to take the rightful stand in the marketplace.

[Nexii Malthus]

Right now, the market incentive is still to create the laggiest product you can get away with. Jewelry for example.

[Komuso Tokugawa]

I find it hilarious that performance/lag/Usability issues serious SL users have been loudly discussing about for years, and have been brushed aside by Hamlet as an official LL product Booster, now suddenly become a hot topic when Hamlet's dweeb hero starts polking holes in the leaky ship that is SL.

Hamlet, you would have a lot more credibility if you had been pushing this question starting 3+ years ago, and sticking with it.

[qarl]

well - the first problem when discussing lag is to realize there are about a dozen conflicting definitions of "lag" - and without specifying which you mean, everyone ends-up talking past each other.

1) there's download speed lag - which effects how quickly objects rez.

2) there's render speed lag - which effects how "responsive" the viewer feels.

3) there's viewer-sim latency lag - which effects how "responsive" avatar movement feels.

4) there's sim-side compute lag, which effects all kinds of movement and script performance.

5) there's backbone lag, which effects (among other things) chat.

...

but mostly, when gamers complain about lag - they mean the render speed lag (2), usually measured in frames per second (FPS). the single greatest reason for this lag is the inherent geometric inefficiency of prims. the (only) solution is the meshes project.

they sometimes also mean latency lag (3) - which can be fixed with client-side physics prediction.

can the system be fixed? yes.

K.

[Delinda Dyrssen]

They should just install the new Z490895-K thingy.

[CyFishy Traveler]

I am an utterly non-techie person, but I will at least say this--performance has definitely improved from what it was when I signed up four years ago and regularly found myself disappearing into the earth while walking around. And when's the last time you teleported somewhere and found your hair at the opposite end?

Could it be improved further? Heck, yes. And I wish them well as they figure out how to do it, but I think that may start with hiring back some of the people they let go, since old-school lag does seem to be creeping back in since the layoffs...

[Gattz Gilman]

Well, one (of many) of the main problems is, most of the content creators are not game designers. Where they know about texture memory, or how too many polygons can cause too much computation. This then leads to client side lag (low fps), and the fact that you might have some high resolution textures will also mean they will take longer to download as well.

So, the freedom to create anything you want is also one of the issues causing lag. Any Joe Schmoe can put a 1024x1024 texture on a little pin, or use all 1024x1024 textures on everything he makes.

It is a good thing that LL had turned down the maximum resolution texture from 2048x2048 to 1024x1024.

[Little Lost Linden]

Maybe if everyone had fiber to the home it would help a bit.

I wonder how many terabytes all the SL regions would add up to if you downloaded them all onto your hard drive? Anyone know the average size in gigs of 1 region?

[Little Lost Linden]

oh, and how a bout a readyload button. So that if for instance, you know you are going to a new region in a few minutes, you could hit the 'super ready load' button and your next region would already be loaded before you got there?

It would be a feature for those who like to plan ahead.

And why can't the land be a little more static in SL? If it were, that would be a lot less to d/l everytime, and it could happen at night or when your offline for your favorite, most highly visited sims. It could use BITS like Windows updates for the land pieces.

[Hamlet Au]

"have been brushed aside by Hamlet as an official LL product Booster, now suddenly become a hot topic when Hamlet's dweeb hero starts polking holes in the leaky ship that is SL. Hamlet, you would have a lot more credibility if you had been pushing this question starting 3+ years ago, and sticking with it."

Komuso, if you can't discuss the topic civilly and without imputing bad motives to others, then you're welcome to take your opinions to other blogs. To correct some mistaken assumptions, I really didn't know much about Pirillo until this week, I haven't been a Linden contractor for four years, and I actually have written about SL lag, even when I was still with Linden (some excerpts below.) I wrote about it in the book too, of course. As a Linden, I was never expected to be SL's official booster, so when people I interviewed mentioned lag, I'd report it. But all those invalid points aside, it's definitely true I could have focused more on it; as an early adopter, like many Residents, I tended to take the lag for granted, as an inevitable part of the SL's architecture as a streaming-based service. That said, I'm not convinced me or anyone else reporting on lag would effected much improvement on what seems to be an intractable problem.

* * *

THE ART OF TECH WAR - Friday, May 19, 2006

http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2006/05/the_art_of_tech.html

The bane of every SL developer is dealing with lag on the system that any script call creates, and getting Tech War with its dozens of fighting 'bots to run smoothly was an agonizing labor for Eckhart Dillon... "Opening was almost a disaster for me," he explains. "There was no limit on how many factory units you could make. So it's all people would make. So we had hundred of tiny robots laggin' the sim to death. I had to limit them after that."

AND YOUR CHICKS FOR FREE - Monday, January 09, 2006

http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2006/01/and_your_chicks.html

His solution was to shoot the fashion show on a private island totally separate from the main grid of Second Life, which his models would teleport to for their shoot, one at a time-- a kind of Platonic ideal of SL, free from the lag caused by any sudden crush of residents or their impromptu creations.

THE NINE SOULS OF WILDE CUNNINGHAM - Wednesday, December 15, 2004

http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2006/01/and_your_chicks.html

Their time in-world is short, and with minutes left before they need to log off, I ask them if they want to fly with me somewhere, for awhile.

"Yes, we can fly," wilde replies, "but following is hard [because of] the lag, but we are willing if you are."

[Hamlet Au]

Qarl, am I reading you right that meshes could solve a lot of the problems, but other aspects of lag, such as rezzing and sim-side compute lag, cannot be fixed as easily?

[Korayama Savard]

I think if there was a minimum requirement for your internet connection. I.E. at least 5mbs. That would be immensely helpful.

[Stephan]

Well, Second Life will get rid of lag. Just the question is when. There are basically two reasons for lag, the hardware (server and client) and the bandwidth. Both will improve with time. It has always been that way. I mean, remember the Internet of the 90s. It was slow, ugly and boring. Today, with much better computers and a lot more bandwidth, that all changed. Same will happen with Second Life. I think an important part that the Lindens can do for little cost, is to make lag more transparent. There is a tool for the avatar rendering cost already. There should be something similar for the object rendering cost, so people can click one or many objects and get their rendering cost. I checked out the amazing The Next Day sims (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kd1abcpFIFI). They have really heavy content, but I had almost no lag. So one way to reduce lag, would be helping the residents to find the sources of lag.
Also many residents have trouble picking the right computer. Giving better recommendations for hardware and optimal bandwidth would be helpful too.

[LokiLoki]

@Korayama Savard the UK average connection rate is under 5MB, Im on 1.5mb connection and seem to run SL pretty fine. I think LL have a few tricks up their sleeves that could relive various areas of Lag, but content creators can also contribute in reducing LAG. Over the years though content creators have learned ways of reducing lag. Some residents have blogs dedicated in getting the best performance from your system.

Lag is an issue that the Lab alone cant fix.

[Ann Otoole InSL]

Content builders that understand what is going on and how to do things right know where the statistics bar is and what ktris/fr is.

I keep it under 500 and try to keep it no higher than 300 inside my stores on the mainland. So when people enter my stores they get a break from the viewer lag. And it makes it easier for them to see what is there and to decide if they want it or not. So I never have much traffic. It simply is not necessary to hang around waiting for stuff to rez. it rezzes fast. I can't do anything about SL having a bad day and the regions barfing though.

Builders have the tools and the power to manage ktris/fr. It is not Linden Lab's fault there are zillion sculpty builds and all the prims have a different 1024*1024 texture on them.

Maybe I won't be sick next year and can deliver the lag cafe display like I was supposed to last time. But then nobody wants to hear they made a pile of lag crap so it would not be a popular display would it.

[Komuso Tokugawa]

Come now Hamlet, don't be ingenuious.
Since the beginning of this blog there has been a most obvious pro-LL bias.

That's certainly your right, but why don't you just admit it instead of pretending otherwise?

If I'm uncivil, then there's a reason behind it, because nice reasoned logic posts appear to get a nice check mark and then move on to the next.

It's actually a positive thing to see obvious pro-LL boosters like yourself, GwynnL, and others finally admit that the platform has serious issues instead of gilding the lily anymore.

btw Lag is just one of the serious SL performance issues, and pulling out a few old posts talking about that means little.
Chat/Group messaging issues, unfixed bugs, broken key features,etc etc... are some of the many others continually ignored by the lab boosters and hence by LL (Jira? hah!)

I maintain if some of these people had adopted a more rationnal and critical systems analysis profile from the beginning LL may have listened a little more closely to the working SL population who were trying to get heard above the booster hype crowd.

I just hope next time you do something like this you adopt a more neutral profile to the developer of the platform.

So long..and thanks for all the fish.

[Komuso Tokugawa]

re: bandwidth is only a partial solution, depending on where you are in the network.

I'm on fibre here in Tokyo, internet speed city, and it does not help. fwiw I suggested to LL back in 2005 to set up regional servers...

[Hitomi Tiponi]

There are so many causes of lag but you can reduce it a lot by being sensible. I hear so many copmplaints that "SL is a piece of **** because I have just bought a brand new pc and it runs rubbish". So here are the tips to make a lot of lag (but not that caused by other avs go away).

1. Your own behaviour in-world.

Build efficiently, remove excess scripts, keep your avs rez cost low and empty your inventory - and be amazed at the performance improvement.

2. What Computer you use.

Most people do not realize that just because you bought the latest computer at your local shop it does not mean that it is any good at running the latest games (manufacturers don't help with this). Running Farmville is completely different from SL and needs special kit. It needn't cost the earth - I have one for £400 ($650) that runs fast even with shadows enabled - you just need to do some research before buying.

3. How you use your computer.

Following on from the above point, if you max out your graphics it slows your machine down, if you have lots of other software running (or any other software) it can slow it down. When you are in sl make sure your computer is focussed on doing that - not downloading mp3s!

4. Your connection.

You can run SL on a 300K link but it is slow - so many people expect it to fly on sub-1 Meg links - it won't! Also using wired may seem old-fashioned but it is faster than wireless.

[Bob L]

Nexii Malthus @ "Right now, the market incentive is still to create the laggiest product you can get away with. Jewelry for example."

The ARC tool covers lagtastic prim heavy attachments. LL needs to educate the Residents as to how this degrades their in world experience so the demand won't be for this kind of poorly performing product.

[Hamlet Au]

"Come now Hamlet, don't be ingenuious. Since the beginning of this blog there has been a most obvious pro-LL bias."

I think you mean disingenuous. And since your belief seems to be unfalsifiable, there's no point in my citing posts that do reflect criticism of Linden Lab, or praise for its competitors, or explaining that no, I don't have a bias for the company, though I do have a bias for Second Life and a desire to see it thrive, which is not exactly the same thing. And since you acknowledged you're unable to be civil about it, best we move on.

[Nat Merit]

At the community meeting Philip outlined plans to improve texture download speeds, sim crossings and chat lag. So that shows there are ways to improve on Qarl's other points

He was just saying 2 and 3 are what gamers are usually talking about when they say SL's performance is poor, and so focused on describing the measures that would fix them (essentially making SL content more like optimised content common in commercial games).

[DJ InsyX Piranha]

I have never had a problem with lag and rezzing and all that, tho mainly cause I am on a business fiber -cable line. My SL hubby had some problems when he was only using a 3meg dsl line but since they upgraded him to 10meg dsl he felt less lag.

Some people also attribute video processing to lag which is totally wrong. The sim FPS is what mostly can be seen as the lag indicator (in the 40's and 30's then sim is running well...20's teens and single digits then you are not going anywhere fast on the sim).

If you are felling to rez and all these video issues it just means you need to update or upgrade your video card or even your machine. This can be costly for some people who do not have true gaming machines. LL definately needs to make a point in having SL work for the regular computer owners.

Yeah I have a beast of a gaming machine (i9 processor /16 gigs ram / 4 vid cards running as one in SLI mode / Coolent gel cooling / ect...) but that desktop is not following me everywhere I use SL. So, I would like to be able to use SL at other places in my life and not be all video drained. I do remember using SL on one of my older machines 3 years ago and it was running ok...not the greatest but I got where I wanted to go and build what I needed. Now a days if you do not have the gaming machine you are screwed. LL needs to make this work for all not a select few.

[DJ InsyX Piranha]

I have never had a problem with lag and rezzing and all that, tho mainly cause I am on a business fiber -cable line. My SL hubby had some problems when he was only using a 3meg dsl line but since they upgraded him to 10meg dsl he felt less lag.

Some people also attribute video processing to lag which is totally wrong. The sim FPS is what mostly can be seen as the lag indicator (in the 40's and 30's then sim is running well...20's teens and single digits then you are not going anywhere fast on the sim).

If you are felling to rez and all these video issues it just means you need to update or upgrade your video card or even your machine. This can be costly for some people who do not have true gaming machines. LL definately needs to make a point in having SL work for the regular computer owners.

Yeah I have a beast of a gaming machine (i9 processor /16 gigs ram / 4 vid cards running as one in SLI mode / Coolent gel cooling / ect...) but that desktop is not following me everywhere I use SL. So, I would like to be able to use SL at other places in my life and not be all video drained. I do remember using SL on one of my older machines 3 years ago and it was running ok...not the greatest but I got where I wanted to go and build what I needed. Now a days if you do not have the gaming machine you are screwed. LL needs to make this work for all not a select few.

[Sandor Balczo]

@hitomi: I didn't know that reducing the number of items in inventory would help reduce lag. Thanks for the tip. What can be considered too many items, in your view?

[Dizzy Banjo]

I believe that as Qarl and others suggest - the problems of 'lag', which is an incredibly vague term, are solvable - with a huge amount of server and client work and probably a number of years of global average bandwidth increase, especially for users that are very remote from the Linden servers.

I think finding a remedy to the perception of SLs performance is both an issue of technical improvement and accurate representation of what SL is actually doing technically, in the way it is described. Something which very few users, or potential users really understand.

Saying all this - I think solving these problems are far from trivial. Also, by the time LL servers, the internet and the client can run SL as it is now, at the level Chris Pirillo would expect - the world will be offering lots of different very exciting things to users.

[Ajax Manatiso]

Stephan is on the money here. Getting faster hardware and more bandwidth on LL's side would greatly improve the lag issue and could almost totally eliminate crashes. Probably the single most instigator of lag on LL's side is their asset servers. If they increase the number of asset servers and have fallback servers for all of them, this would eliminate lag and crashes by over 50 per cent. There is nothing you can do for crappy client hardware and bandwidth, but LL is also guilty of penny-pinching on their side.

[Ignatius Onomatopoeia]

I have:

--Brand-new laptop (MacBook Pro, 8 GB RAM). I've also tried a very fast desktop Windows 7 PC w/ a good graphics card, for comparison's sake
--a bunch of SL clients but not Viewer 2 or Emerald(probably never will switch)
--Company high-speed at work, fiber at home
--Client(s) optimized for speed & avatar's rendering costs low as I can manage.

Results at most any graphics setting:

--Texture rendering is faster than what I saw on the video run yesterday
--Crashes nil except on latest Imprudence client
--Lag at our weekly VWER meetings (25-40 avatars w/ all sorts of rendering costs) nil. Some gray avatars remain when numbers exceed 30.

But:

--Sim crossings stink in every client or either machine, esp. in vehicles
--Lag walking depends on the sim

I'm guessing my two problems at the end are LL's issue, not the machines' or our ISPs' fault. I'm no techie but that sounds like a server-side issue.

When LL makes it possible to have a motor-rally across the Mainland without victory being "who finishes at all" things will have improved.

[Buckaroo Mu]

My humble submissions:

1) Uncompressed, much heftier texture cache
We're spending way too much time re-downloading and re-decompressing textures. HD space is much less expensive than bandwidth these days, it's well past time to start storing cached textures in instantly-usable fashion, and seriously increase the number kept. A better discard algorithm is required as well.

2) HTTP Textures / no sim-side texture downloads
This is already becoming a reality - or at least the first, not sure of the second. HTTP Textures are turning out fantastic (try it and see!). If the textures are downloaded directly from the asset server/cloud storage, that's one BIG job and storage/memory requirement the simulator doesn't have to deal with. Never understood why sims re-served textures anyway.

3) Tighter interest-list
The server keeps a list of everything it should be telling you about - the "interest list". It spends a great deal of time worrying about that, and the number of avatars in the sim (and their draw distance setting) can greatly affect how computationally challenging this is. Not sure how it can get fixed, but it needs to be looked at.

I know there's more, but I just woke up and can't think yet.

[Arcadia Codesmith]

I don't agree that lag/latency issues can ever be "solved" -- you canna change the laws o' physics -- but they can be minimized to the point where they're unnoticable to the end user.

Here's the rub: you can't rely on content creators or content consumers to do it. Experience shows that a fair percentage of them are going to show up to crowded sims in outfits with astronomical ARCs and active scripts no matter how much you educate them, and then complain bitterly when they can't move.

I dearly want meshes as a creator, but even if we get them, they're not going to displace prim builds until mesh creation tools are built into the client and accessible to everybody AND are as easy or easier to use than primatives.

A key thing we need is a two pronged approach to graphics -- one prong that squeezes every bit of performance out of the latest and greatest graphics hardware and technology, and another prong that seeks to optimize compression, encoding and rendering in a scalable fashion so we can achieve good performance even on substandard machines and connections.

We don't have the luxury of waiting for the technology to catch up with the vision. The vision always moves faster.

[Adric Antfarm]

For the love God.... give the Inception thing a rest. 4chan you are not.

[FlipperPA Peregrine]

Many of us have suggested for years to create incentives for making more efficient content. Back in 2003, I had noticed that many people, for example, were using 1024x1024 textures for tiny objects, like flowers. Bedazzled did this when they redesigned the Ahern welcome area, and also included an alpha channel when no transparency was needed, creating server and client lag at several levels. I suggest something like a "per pixel" upload cost for textures, which would force content creators to be more efficient. For example:

A 128x128 texture would cost L$5 to upload.
A 256x128 or 128x256 would cost L$10 to upload.
A 256x256 would cost L$20 to upload.
A 512x512 would cost L$80 to upload
A 1024x1024 would cost L$320 to upload.

This would force people to be much more efficient with their textures. Similar costs could be attached to less efficient scripts and animations. I remember running our first shop in Indigo back in early 2004, and finding one merchant who had 1 meter by 1 meter product boxes, all of which used 1024x1024 textures... ridiculous! Unless your force the users to be more efficient, the continuing attitude will be "efficiency be damned, as long as *I* look good!" Or people who are just unaware of the issues.

A structured cost with benefits for building efficient content would educate content creators, reduce lag grid-wide, and if it had been imposed much earlier, made a much better experience for everyone.

[Wol Euler]

I don't see how "going into the cloud" would make a bit (pun intended) of difference: that only swaps Amazon's servers for Linden Lab's servers. As long as the data is held in the web, not on my hard disk as RPGs do, it will need to be transmitted *from* the web *to* my viewer. Would Amazon's servers really be significantly faster than LL's under the same load?

FWIW I'm in Germany, running SL on a quad4 machine with 4Gb of memory and a NVIDIA g250+ card, using standard DSL, and I get 25 to 40 FPS everywhere.

[Daniel Smith]

I've noticed that muting avatars at large events (so that they dont completely render) works pretty well. The problem is, I just want to "mute" the rendering, not the conversation. Would be nice to have the granularity of selectively "render muting" an AV.

I've also been to events where they wont even start until everyone gets their ARC way down.

[Dimitrio Lewis]

Flipper, one idea I had a while back was for the server to behave like Flickr and create multiple copies of each texture under a single UUID. One at the original resolution, a 512x512 copy, a 256x256 copy and so on. Then when a texture was applied to a prim, the server would automatically select which resolution to use based on geometry, ensuring efficient texture usage without requiring technical knowledge.

I asked about it and was told that JPEG2000 already has a resolution scaling feature making this idea redundant. If that's true, could someone explain why we still have this resolution problem?

Any solution for textures (or scripts or prims) has to cater to the typical user, a person who lacks all but the most basic technical understanding. Efficiency has to assert itself.

[Ann Otoole InSL]

ARC is crap. Anyone that goes by ARC is ignorant and needs to quit SL and go back to WoW. And stay there as all they add to SL is intolerance and conflict.

Flame on all you want but ARC is bullshit and was created to deflect blame for the 30,000 polygons windlight renders whether you can see it or not (occlusion does not keep windlight from rendering first) onto the residents. The Pastrami Linden even posted a blog article calling all the customers of Linden Lab retarded. ARC was created to cause the community to go at each other's throats. And the ignorant of SL ate it up and started harrassing one another.

Case in point: Make an object out of the same sculpt texture 100 times. The ARC cannot calculate the polygons for a sculpty accurately nor can it determine that the texture was identical and the sculpt map and texture only had to download once.

Buy a decent computer with a quality video card and power supply. Or STFU and lower your graphics to low and like it.

Oh, and BTW, put 40 naked avatars in an empty region and guess what? The lag is still there because the region code can't handle over 10 avatars effectively.

Now go learn what ktris/fr is and STFU with this bogus ARC crap. ARC can't even tell that someone is wearing a mono infected pile of resizers anyway. ARC needs to identify if the scripts are made of mono and make the ARC blink in reddish violet saying "WATCH OUT SIM GONNA FREEZE MONO NUKER IN BOUND". But your precious ARC can't really tell about how bad and crappily a script is written can it?

ARC: It's what idiots use.

[Hitomi Tiponi]

someone mentioned one of Ann's favourite topics :).

Someone asked about reducing inventory. The main problem with inventory is with sim handovers when crossing boundaries or teleporting (can leave you timed out in tps). Try it by creating a new alt and comparing with your normal av while wearing the same clothes/huds. once you start going over 10,000 it seems to become really noticeable. I did a test with my normal av (15,000 items) against my newish alt (2,500 items) and the differences were so noticeable that I am clearing out all my old stuff.

[Daniel Smith]

Gee Ann, I wonder if you would say that to my face, in RL, or in world (Bucky Barkley).

Calm down.

[Komuso Tokugawa]

ack ... My bad spelling, I meant ingenuous -> http://thesaurus.com/browse/ingenuous

[Komuso Tokugawa]

...and the suggestions for educating content creators on performance driven content design are great, and are also one key link in the chain to creating an optimal experience. Every 3D engine has limits, and any designer needs to understand them and design for them.

[Ann Otoole InSL]

I'll say it anywhere pal. What? Did you think I was afraid to speak the truth?

I don't suffer from viewer lag. I bought a $100 GT240 and $120 more for a new 650w PSU (to support the next video card upgrade that will be needed next year).

People can stop drinking, smoking pot, and eating expensive stuff for a couple of months and save the measly money up to upgrade to a decent computer. Or set graphics on low. Ever tried that? The "no rounded edges" mode? lol. Lego land would be best for them.

Oh, and BTW, the MAIN reason people like SL is because of the high quality avatars and personalization. Not because of badly textured misaligned disco builds.

[Melissa Yeuxdoux]

How many content creators can do computational complexity analyses of their scripts?

SL content creators vary enormously in their experience and their ability to optimize their work. That guarantees bad performance.

[EnCore Mayne]

something's up
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYYVe9JyQhw>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYYVe9JyQhw

[Arcadia Codesmith]

In any situation with user-generated content, content is going to vary in both quality and efficient utilization of resources.

In fact, the two often conflict. Creators play to the market, not to the overall health of the system. The market most often demands high-quality texturing and detailing. If you're very talented, you can fake detail while maintaining an optimized product... but that particular talent is rare and undervalued.

Tiered upload pricing based on resolution just provides more benefit for the wealthy (for whom even the most punative charge is trivial) while penalizing the poor.

But the fact that creators won't toe the line doesn't guarantee bad performance if the platform is very smart about user-generated content. That may mean server-side prerendering (what Hamlet refers to as 'the cloud'), or translating prim builds to efficient meshes before pushing them to the client. It definitely means better script handling and prioritization.

Telling everybody they've got to invest in a six core processor with a hot new video card (or two) is NOT realistic. Second Life is not and will probably never be Ultra Mega Fortress Deathmatch 3000. It's a social world accessed by people around the globe, often on modest systems resold or donated as obsolete by developed nations. These aren't fringe users we can afford to ignore; they're a huge chunk of SL's core user base.

That doesn't mean all improvements have to be targeted at the lowest common denominator, but it does mean that more needs to be done to make sure the client degrades gracefully (and preferably, automatically) on modest clients.