July 16, 2010 Second Life now running twice as many sims per server

A post this morning by Kanbe  made me look closer at the Sim Stats collected by the Free Google Translator and my bot network.  The Lindens have doubled the number of sims  running on a CPU from the former maximum of 8, to 16 on the same IP address for at least  331 sims scanned in the last 24 hours, and for at least 7,584 that were scanned in the last week.    This data is fresh, since a re-scan of the entire grid was just completed.  Half the grid was scanned in less than 24 hours with help from Gino Rascon and over 80,000 translators.

I know for a fact that many people get angry when they realize their expensive CPU is being shared. They think that a private estate that rents for about $400.00 US a month would have it's own dedicated server.   And now we get half of the server that we had before!   I don't really mind, myself, after all, Linden Labs is a business and they have to make money off of us.   I just wish they would charge me more and give me my own dedicated Intel I7 CPU with DDR3 triple bank memory! Until then, I'll vote with my feet with a reboot when I see we are sharing Phaze Demesnes with a famous Nude Beach loaded with 100 avatars and thousands of super-high rez  textures.

What does this mean for performance?   It certainly will have some negative effect, even with Lindens using hopefully higher performance servers with more cores.  The sims still share one disk, probably just one memory bus (only an I7 with triple DDR3 RAM sticks would help that), and other peripherals including the network connection.  The graph on the left (below) shows the number of sims per server for all sims known to be up in the last 24 hours, a total 14,973 of them.  

 
   click to zoom - sims per server

This next pair of charts shows them as a percentage:  as you can see, about 25% of all 'up' sims share their space with 2 other 'up' sims. About 20% share a full load of 4 sims.  The 8 per and others OI believe are Linden Lands and light duty sims such as OpenSpace.   What is new is the number of sims greater than 8.   The graph on the left (below) shows the data for the last week and the graph on the right  (below) shows the number of 'up' sims scanned within the last 24 hours.

&nb 
 click to zoom

These stats come from the 25,834 sims tagged as 'up' in the database (visited by a translator or a bot) so the sim IP address and name match within that time frame.  Some error range is to be expected, as sim IP addresses move a lot when they are rebooted, and the translators and bots take time to rescan the entire list of 31,560 sims.  So some data will be out of date.  For individual sims, you can ask the bots to revisit with just one click, and they will re-scan your neighbors within a minute or so.   The 5,726 uncounted sims are not shown for several  reasons.   They either have not been visited by one of my Free Translators, or the sim is set to 'no access' to the bots, a teleport failed,  or they were listed as 'down' by the Second Life system.

And many thanks to Gino Rascon for helping run all these bots!

Ferd Frederix - email me: fred at mitsi.com