Linden Lab delays script-limitations to Q3
Filed under: Economy, News items, Second Life, Virtual worlds
Linden Lab has announced that script-limitations for the new Homesteads/Openspaces products will not be going ahead in Q1 2009 as originally expected, and will be delayed until Q3 2009. Script limitations were announced to be an integral part of the revised product specification for void simulators, and the details of those limitations were expected to be announced before they went on sale at Noon on Monday, 5 January.
Instead, Q1 will see the rollout of internal data-collection systems to monitor scripting loads in all simulators on the Second Life grid followed by determination of what limits should be put into place. Q2 will see the deployment of tools in the viewer for users to better assess script workloads. Q3 is scheduled for of those script limits, but Linden Lab is leaving a little wiggle-room, and Q3 may yet slip.
Judging based on past Linden Lab project timelines, we'd expect Q3 to slip to Q1 2010.
Reduction in the usage of void simulators as a result of the new pricing and specifications led to a net reduction in simulator usage of 1997 simulators in November 2008 and an additional 2007 simulators in December 2008. An additional 83 have been decommissioned so far this month.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Jovin said on 11:03AM 1-04-2009
So that's another year of frustration for those Homestead/OpenSpace owners sharing a CPU with a selfish 'neighbour'?
Linden Lab are either incapable of implementing a software solution for this or incapable of making a decision about it, either way it's the kind of waffle-headed crap most of us are sick of. Why not implement a script-limit on an interim basis, monitor it weekly/monthly and adapt it as needed over a period of time? They could even pretend to consult with Residents during this time since that kind of PR seems important to them.
At least that way Homestead owners could be guaranteed a minimum level of performance thru the evaluation period - this way they are only guaranteed more frustration.
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Loki said on 11:42AM 1-04-2009
can someone PLEASE for the love of god tell me WHY i'm paying extra?? with all the protesting, script nonsense and excessive use stories, i've kinda missed the actual true reason they needed to up the price.
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Tateru Nino said on 12:18PM 1-04-2009
We've been asking, since the beginning, but we don't have an answer yet.
Dale Innis said on 1:29PM 1-04-2009
I'm still utterly baffled by all this: if (as some of the words in the most recent official weblog posting on the subject suggest in passing) each of the sims that share a single computer are being run by a different and identifiable process, then (assuming they're running some plausible operating system like say Linux) can't they just *tell the OS* not to let any of those processes use more than their fair share of the CPU?
Rather than spending a year instrumenting and studying and designing ways to monitor and limit things way up at the high level of scripts, to try to roughly approximate an even sharing of CPU resources, just tell the OS to do it: that's what an OS is *for*!
In the case of bandwidth or asset server load, it would be harder, but script limits are (as far as I know) almost entirely about CPU consumption. And even if it would mean spending a week looking into the best way to do per-process CPU-limiting under whatever OS they're using, surely that would be less trouble than the sixteen-month process that they're currently setting out on? And it would be completely transparent to the residents, too...
I guess they've probably thought about that solution and decided it wouldn't work. But I haven't seen them mention it anywhere...
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Ciaran Laval said on 1:50PM 1-04-2009
The answer I've been provided with for the new pricing structure is "We believe that's the correct price". There has so far been no attempt other than that to justify it.
As for the scripting limits, this looks to me like a project that goes beyond openspaces and homesteads, this is going to be an interesting one to watch.
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Graves said on 1:29AM 1-06-2009
I was very interested to see that they were going to be adding on script limitations, which they also tacked on a heavy drop in number of avatars per Void/homestead/openspace that can be used, and jacked up the price somewhat, this is dealing heavier and heavier blows to the owners.
("The aim here is to prevent the overuse that can negatively impact the performance of other regions on the same CPU." -Official blog, "overuse" isn't defined)
Plus, making the sim's much more undesirable, and likely to speed up the amount of sims dropping off. Knowing LL, they are very likely to misrepresent the numbers they give to us (if any), and cut off a significant portion of script usage to those types of sims. Above and beyond all that, they're adding more crap to the clients as well.
("...we still have to then build into the viewer the tools you will need to monitor and measure your own script usage" -Official blog. Since we know how well the ARC turned out, I can't wait to see 'script server cost' and it's inaccuracies.)
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