Linden Lab Confirms SL Sim Crossing Improved -- Due to Code, Not Cloud

Linden Lab has a blog post that almost seems like a direct response to the one New World Notes posted yesterday, wondering whether the improvements to SL sim crossings in the test grid were a temporary, unintentional side effect. But as April Linden writes, they are real, and a result of changing some code in order to optimize how SL worked once it's deployed to the Amazon cloud:

When you crossed from one region to another, the regions were putting a lot of information into large packets and sending them across our network. This was usually okay because our network was purposefully built to run Second Life. Then, as soon we tried to do this on someone else’s network (in the cloud), things didn’t work quite right. The problem was most noticeable when crossing from a region in our data center to one in the cloud...

[O]ur engineering team decided to use another way to send the data across the network, using the same protocol and method we use for other types of data. Most importantly, it is faster and more reliable. That did the trick! We’re still collecting statistics on the impact this change has, but things are looking very positive.

Once this new code was written, the performance when going  from region to region got a lot better, and it worked between our data center and the cloud! The improvement was so dramatic that we decided to not make our Residents wait for uplifted simulators, and rolled the changes out right away. That code is what rolled out to the grid this week.

More intensely geeky details here. So the improvements are based not so much on cloud deployment itself, so much as they are based on improvements made to the codebase in order run well on the cloud.

Comments

[Kitty Revolver]

good code is good code doesn't matter where and when

[Adeon Writer]

Would have been more handy to fix in 2007, but better late than never.

[sirhc desantis]

Nice to see something that needed fixing being done and yeah been testing and its fun.
Even better that its not plastic natasha related as meh to that =^^= Now get all that eep disaster out of the way so resources can be used for all the other annoying things and I will be more than happy with our premium costs. Especially on giving us a boost for bloody optimising our own stuff hah

[Wrath]

hmmm Big enough difference to come back to SL after many years away? (Asking for an avatar..)

[justaplayer now]

One in a while they get something right. They should have focused on this instead of Sansar which is a failure and up for sale. SL was purchased by 2 guys hoping to salvage the ailing Linden Labs. And still they have thousands of people who were kicked out because they were accused of breaking TOS. With no proof, only accusations. Lets hope that "fixing" things inworld will slow down the steady decline in membership. It's like someone came through SL with a can of "Real Kill" and avatars dropped like flies. For those who are left, this improvement makes their lives more enjoyable.