Monthly Archives: October 2009

200 bots

200 bots

Today, while we were doing load tests in Wright Plaza, I was also doing another kind of load test on my standalone. This one relates to server-side bots. I was able to have a 3×3 megaregion with ~2,000 prims, 200 bots and my client connected to it!

My client was quite happy. The only thing that didn’t seem to be working was the walking animation. Apart from that, I was able to walk, fly, chat and generally interact without much lag. Pushing it to 300 didn’t quite work well yet, I was stuck in 10, 10, 10 on login.

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The Ugly Side of Crowdsourcing

Goggle has announced its 3D Building maker for Google Earth. It looks really nice and simple. I think Google is getting that most people aren’t expert 3D modelers, and as such, simple tools that produce simple models will go a long way in modeling the entire planet.

Google’s intention is great at face value. However, I can’t help but wonder what will Google do with all that content produced by thousands of people around the world. If Goggle ever monetizes Google Earth, will it give back to the creators of those buildings? Or, like what Google does on the Web, will it take the content and run its own business without paying back to content producers?

OpenSim: 50 avies

We hit a milestone today in OpenSim. We piled up 52 avatars in OSGrid’s Wright Plaza sim, under 600M of RAM, and after an uptime of 10 hours. It eventually crashed, probably due to a lurking ultra-conservative lock somewhere in code. But hey! — this is fantastic news for OpenSim-based worlds. I can see 1.0 on the horizon.

Over the last few days, one of the key components of OpenSim, the code that deals with packets from/to the clients, has been replaced  with a new packet handler written by Intel’s John Hurliman. This is proving to be a Good Thing. Also last week we have identified and eliminated a major memory leak that was making OpenSim eventually run out of memory.

Hopefully when we get to 1.0 we will be able to consistently support 50+ avatars simultaneously under 500M of RAM and without crashing.

Serverless grids

There is a new diva distribution available. It is packaged out of the bleeding edge OpenSim, revision 11056. If you have the previous release installed, you can simply run Update.exe.

In the past 2 weeks there has been a lot of plumbing in OpenSim, and things have improved considerably. First and foremost, we have identified and eliminated a memory leak that was causing OpenSim to use all memory over time, and eventually crash. Now OpenSim runs on much more reasonable memory footprint, and stays within that limit [for much longer].

Second, we have rewritten the grid service from scratch. The grid service is the part of OpenSim that manages region registration and lookup. All OpenSim installations have a grid service, even if they are standalones. In fact this distinction between standalone and “grid mode” is becoming fuzzier and fuzzier. So much so that it is now possible to have grids by stitching together standalone installations of OpenSim — without having to run any other servers!

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