[sldev] Re: OS-SL Development Issues (was Upcoming viewer releases)

[Dale Glass]

On Wed, Aug 29, 2007 at 10:06:43AM -0700, Kelly Linden wrote:
> There has been no recent development on this, and I don't think ever any
> development beyond design discussion.  It is a non-trivial task and it
> may take some convincing to move it into the 'improves stability of SL'
> group.
Fair enough

> This is actually a complex system on the server end.  Changing this to
> be more IRC like would actually reduce complexity of the group IM system
> a fair amount .... until someone says 'make it an option'.  As far as I
> know we are the only chat system (in any game, irc or other chat system)
> that behaves this way.
I mean, wouldn't just patching the viewer be enough?

Just make it send a "leave IM" message automatically when a new group IM
arrives and this option is enabled. A problem would be a flood of "X
left this session", but that's fixable.

> Now group messages are
> routed to users through their respective simulator hosts by looking up
> the presence information for each person etc.  This is a more
> complicated system that in theory scales better with the number of users
> and regions.  However 'scales better' doesn't equal 'performs better'
> and we are still making improvements to this system.
Why do it on a sim basis instead of internally keeping several large
servers?

SL sims are generally not very populated. (NTS: calculate the average of
avatars per sim on sims with avatars sometime). Without seeing the
server's source it's of course hard to tell, but my wild guess that with SL
userbase being as spread out as it is, the pessimistic case of each
avatar being on its own sim is probably not that uncommon, and the
growth of SL might not help as people probably rarely use group IM when
they're near each other.

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