Unrest in Cyberspace

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The world of Second Life is divided into thousands of individual regions, or "sims," each 65,536 square meters in area (about 16 acres). Linden Lab's data facilities include more than 20,000 servers, each running one to four sims. The simulation software controls everything going on in its sim, from rendering the terrain and the 3-D models that make up the environment to animating members' avatars, retrieving their inventories, performing searches, sending instant messages to members in other sims, and communicating with storage databases. If an avatar crosses from one sim into another, every bit of information about that avatar must be handed over to the new sim. The more sims Linden adds to accommodate new members, the more communication goes on between sims, and the greater the burden on each server and on the "backbone" lines connecting them.

"I don't believe [this architecture] is scalable, at least not to the sizes I want to see it scale to," said Zero Linden, a "studio director," or software development manager, at Linden Lab, at a smaller meeting on May 2. (Linden Lab identifies most of its employees only by their in-world names, which always include the surname "Linden.") But there are "major architectural changes underfoot," he says, designed to reduce the need for constant connectivity between servers.

The new architecture, briefly referenced by Ondrejka and described in more detail by Zero Linden, would divide up responsibility for each sim into two new classes of programs. "Agent domain" programs would be solely responsible for avatars and their inventories, while "region domain" programs would simulate the environment and its physics. This way, information about an avatar would stay in one place even if the avatar itself crossed sims. "We don't need to push responsibility around as much," Zero Linden notes.

Zero Linden says that the company plans to roll out this new architecture sim by sim, probably starting in 2008.

But that's too late for many members, such as Cristiano Diaz, a software developer based in Miami Beach, who wrote and publicized the open letter with help from other disgruntled Second Lifers. Like many other residents, he says that he's saddened by the bugs and by the real economic hits reported by members who have lost inventory or suffered other disruptions to their business. "For a long time, it has felt like the promise of what Second Life can really be is being hampered by technical problems and mismanagement," says Diaz. "It is frustrating and discouraging to watch something you are passionate about languishing because of so many problems."

But at the town-hall meeting, Ondrejka was insistent that conditions will improve if Linden Lab developers and Second Life residents can work together to ride out the current hiccups. "Patience obviously helps, but more than that, please help the community build the pieces it needs to make Second Life a better place," he told the audience. "If you are a programmer ... come work for us. If you have bugs and can reproduce them, add them into our public JIRA [Linden Lab's bug-tracking system]. As Bill and Ted would say, be excellent to each other."