The Lindens are Stingy With Resources

Two of Lilith Heart's Three-Prim Strelitzia on the Volcano Pele

Two of Lilith Heart's One-Prim Sculpted Strelitzia on the Volcano Pele

Since the Photos Don't Quite Show the Difference, Here is:
One-Prim Sculpted Strelitzia at Left, Three-Prim Strelitzia at Right

Written 6 January, 2012

The Lindens are Stingy With Resources

Second Life is ever so much more rich and complex than it was when I first came here in 2006. There are all sorts of new features: Windlight skies, new physics and scripting engines, sculpted prims, voice, and now mesh-- many of which require more computing horsepower than did the 2006 version of Second Life.

Sculpted Prims and now mesh create visually complex objects that use far fewer prims than would have been possible in 2006. I have, for instance, sculpts from Lilith Heart that use but one prim but provide a patch of foliage that would have required 100 of her original three-prim plants-- and the one-prim mesh piano pictured in the previous post would have required well more than 100 prims.

This means we can make our sims and parcels more complex, more dense. We can fill them up with more stuff while keeping our prim counts steady or even decreasing them.

We've done that on Whimsy. Over the past three-and-a-half years we've added feature after feature while maintaining around 2500 free prims. It's wonderful.

And yet over the past five years computers have become faster and more powerful-- and cheaper.

The Lindens have taken advantage of cheap processing power by cramming more regions on each server; rather than allotting a portion of the increased horsepower to each region, they simply add more regions.

This is hardly fair.

I call upon Linden Lab to give us more processing power-- at least 25% more, to allow heavily loaded sims to run faster.

And while you're at it, how about giving us at least 25% more prims for each region.