[sldev] Exciting reuter's post about OpenSim - project to create open source version of SL Servers

[John Hurliman]

Laurent Laborde wrote:
> On 9/8/07, Nicholaz Beresford <nicholaz at blueflash.cc> wrote:
>   
>> Laurent Laborde wrote:
>>     
>>> So where do you store the inventory if not on a specialized asset
>>> server (which is a cluster anyway) ?
>>>
>>> On sim server ? aren't they already overloaded ?
>>>       
>> On the client.  I'm amazed that for an Open Source project like
>> OpenSim everybody still thinks the assets need protection.  If it
>> were me, I'd start that thing with client side full perm inventory.
>>     
>
> And when you logout ?
>   

When you log out then there is no need for your inventory to be 
connected to the grid any more, since the only person who has access to 
your inventory is yourself. Things like offline inventory offers would 
probably go away though, unless one of the sims temporarily stored the 
assets that are supposed to be transferred and got ahold of you the next 
time you logged in to that sim. That has some messy edge cases though.

> And even if i don't logout... how do i stream content of my 20 sims
> with my 128/2048 ADSL line to 150 concurent user ?
>   

Prims that are in a simulator (ie, have LocalIDs) are not the same as 
prims on the asset server which is not the same as items in your 
inventory that link to prims on the asset server. No one is suggesting 
that you host 20 simulators on your ADSL line, or constantly stream 
large amounts of data from your local inventory to multiple people.
> Content have to be stored somewhere else than the client.
> On sim (with the problems said earlier) or on dedicated asset servers.
>
>   

Not true at all, there are many different ways you could implement a 
distributed grid architecture that involved storing inventory on the 
client. To achieve most of them would require throwing out the idea of 
protected assets and the notion of selling prims to other avatars, so it 
might not be a path that Linden Labs is interested in pursuing but they 
are still workable ideas for an open grid.

I have some more specific thoughts on how better decentralization and 
scalability could be achieved but I'll save them for next Thursday.

John Hurliman