Digital Rainout

Today, Second Life became unavailable for the same reasons that 3rd party large-scale server-based architectures should not be relied on to support mission-critical virtual worlds in any serious way. The outage happened just at the time that Aaron Walsh of the Media Grid Immersive Education Initiative was hosting a Second Life in-world meeting to discuss the status of Media Grid's Immersive Education Platform Ecosystem, Education Grid, and the baseline requirements for the next generation (aka "3rd generation") of Immersive Education platforms. On the schedule was a discussion of the Cobalt peer-to-peer approach to platform scalability. Ironically, we were unable to discuss scalable peer-to-peer architectures today because of the lack of scalability of Second Life.

Here is what Linden Lab had to say about the outage: "In order to increase overall stability of the grid today during peak usage hours, our operations team has disabled a set of in world functions to reduce overall database load and create a more reliable experience for everyone. As a side effect of these temporary changes, some group and avatar profile services will not be available." Perhaps a more reliable experience for someone - but certainly not us. Its a shame that a modest thirty or so people who were trying to get together in world for a scheduled event were unable to do so because of who-knows-what was happening somewhere else in Second Life. Why shouldn't a mere thirty people be able to just get together without having to rely on the vagaries or expense of some commercial server infrastructure or service? Why should everyone be tied to a single bottleneck infrastructure? I guess the answer is that we need to step up our efforts to bring Cobalt to beta!