Second Life is in the news today (Tuesday December 5th, 2006) due to a series of problems that it had because of its popularity. This is the recipe of success:
Hardware:
The world of Second Life is create by many small worlds all linked to similar neighbouring worlds. Each server can host up to 4 of these worlds and the company’s plans are soon to upgrade the servers with a new range that each can run effectively more scripts and with a better performance than before. The new servers will be Intel based for the first time (all previous versions were using AMD CPUs), have 4 GB of RAM and use SATA disks. Additionally this server version uses almost 30% less power than the previous version.
Each of these servers does nothing more than any other server in the world and this can be described just like the same things that any web hosting business offers to all customers (that is space, bandwidth and CPU power). Second Life “lets” its servers and asks for a maintenance fee at a much higher rate than they are worth in the market trying to make more profit but many disappointed users criticise this tactic.
Currently it runs on more than 4000 servers in two data farms, one in San Francisco (Linden Lab’s headquarters) and another one in Dallas, USA.
Software:
Second Life uses Debian Linux, Apache web server, MySQL database and the Squid web proxy. Very frequent problems caused by software glitches include:
Attacks
Just like any other proprietary platform, that becomes successful, Second Life become hackers target many times. Passwords were stolen, Denial of Service attacks have been launched and of course attempts against user’s bank accounts have been reported.
Usage growth:
0 Responses to “How to build a Second Life universe and make it successful and profitable”