Is SL's Move to the Amazon Cloud Really Improving Sim Crossing, Or Is It Just a Temporary, Unintentional Side Effect?

Update, 8/14: Linden Lab confirms some recent code changes have improved sim crossing.

Virtual world explorer Luca is the latest to stress test the new deployment of Second Life running on the Amazon Web Services cloud, which seems to make region crossing near seamless. Though as you'll see above, region crossing delays vary by vehicle, being near-instantaneous with a World War II-era fighter, but being pretty muddy via, say, submarine.

"Maybe it depends on the amount of linksets now more than ever (the sub and steamboat have a lot of them)," Luca theorizes, "but I might need to do further testing to verify that!"

Luca adds that he got pretty good performance with more than one vehicle too: "I was able to do some sort of formation flying around Bay City with my friend earlier in our planes, which would've been a lot more difficult with the old crossing performance." I'm curious if performance would remain decent with many more vehicles.

But is this performance improvement real, and lasting? Reddit's /SecondLife co-host "0xc0ffea" makes a very good case that it's not:

Faster than normal crossings should be expected during the cloud migration between adjacent regions within the same data center. We can't tell if the cloud move will result in faster crossings till all of SL is moved over...

Unless Linden Lab actually come out and say "we did the thing" this is an unintentional side effect of something else. There is nothing in any of the release notes for recent server updates. I'm going to stick my neck out and guess ... this is a result of temporary over-provisioning.  

More conversation here. I definitely agree we shouldn't assume sim crossing will stay seamless forever -- certainly not after masses of users pile into the Amazon-powered version of SL with their masses of poorly optimized content.

Comments

[Alicia]

1st vehicle was 2-3 seconds.

2nd vehicle was approx. 3.5 seconds.

3rd vehicle was 1 second.

4th vehicle was approx. 2.5 - 2.75 seconds.

5th vehicle was 8 seconds.

6th vehicle was 4.25 seconds.

7th vehicle was 1 second.

8th vehicle was nearly 3 seconds.

9th vehicle was 1 second.

Remember folks, milliseconds go very quickly and you will go past the one second mark on nearly every vehicle.

So on average, and on the beta grid mind you where hardly anyone but creators head to, those vehicles are averaging 2.91 - 3.1 seconds of sim crossing via the cloud deployment. Bare in mind that there's hardly any user in the area as it's the beta grid. That crossing is not an improvement whatsoever.

For the crossings to be flawless, it would literally have to be an open world environment where everything is connected seamlessly, IE: MMOs. MMOs have seamless crossings because they're designed to be open world for the most part.
SL sims are not connected in that seamless manner and require a couple of seconds to negotiate the crossing. When this goes live, and the masses with their overly high poly and vastly poorly optimized content (mesh) get to play with this, then you'll see how this does not fix the problem of sim crossings.

Remember folks, SL was never developed to handle this. The more they continue to add band-aids to the source code and reverse-built engine, the closer they get to the point where they can no longer update SL. This is exactly one of the many reasons why the second generation of MMOCs must be embraced and given the chance to flourish.

[Alicia]

Oh, and yes, before anyone says that I'm full of it and counted too fast; I actually did watch the video and actually counted the seconds from each crossing, making certain I did it rhythmically to get my figures.

[Huck Hax]

Linden Lab have now published some information on this. The cloud migration exposed some old bugs which has prompted a re-engineering of how sim crossings are done. https://community.secondlife.com/blogs/entry/5560-whoosh-what%E2%80%99s-up-with-region-crossings

[0xc0ffea]

Seem's the Linden's did indeed do the thing .. just didn't mention doing the thing till the thing was spotted and people started testing to see if the thing was real.