Second Life Swapping Engines At 40,000 Feet

The rapidly increasing number of users of the virtual world software system Second Life is starting to cause performance problems requiring some architectural redesign of the system.

The number of users logged in at any given time is increasing by about 20% each month and has reached more than 36,000. Second Life currently runs on some 2,000 Debian Linux boxes located in San Francisco and Dallas.

In order increase the capacity of the system from 100,000 concurrent users to tens of millions concurrent users, the company is looking to increase the number of servers to 10,000 while making sure the software remains responsive to all users. Joe Miller, VP of platform and technology development for Linden Lab, likens this operation to swapping engines at 40,000 feet.

Second Life enables its virtual residents to engage in various activities, such creating and building static or animated objects, interacting with people, or buying and selling objects and land. Each member can design its own avatar and determine how the member's model in the virtual world looks like.

The project was initiated in 2003 and its population has grown explosively over the past year. From 100,000 residents at the beginning 2006, the number has now reached more than 2.4 million. The program has its own virtual currency to conduct business. Interestingly, this currency can be exchanged with real US dollars.

Real world business opportunities provided by this virtual world have attracted real world companies such as Sun Microsystems which has used this venue to promote its new gaming solutions, and Reuters has set up shop to deliver news reports to and from Second Life.

The client software source code for Second Life has been released under the GNU GPL license. The Linux client features the same functions as the Windows and Mac OS X versions and can be downloaded here.