Outdated Virtual World Servers
Worse than the fact that Linden Lab has done little to update the look and feel of Second Life to keep up with the capabilities of the current personal computer hardware is the fact that they have done little to update their virtual world servers. Similar to website servers, virtual world servers need to respond to user requests quickly enough that the person is not distracted by needing to wait for the requested content to load. When a website a server responds slowly, the result is that the web page loads slowly, tending to cause users to go to other pages. When a virtual world server responds slowly, the result is that there is a lag between the user commanding their avatar to move and seeing it move on the screen.
When using Second Life, it is very common to experience this lag even in simulations that have few or no other avatars in them. It is clear when using Second Life that Linden Lab must have tried to reduce this lag by setting up separate servers for each element of the virtual world experience. This is a common approach to serve modern web pages where content is provided by one server, advertisements are provided by another server, and streaming video is provided by yet another server.
In Second Life, there is minimal lag to logon or text chat because these functions transfer little data and must be served by Linden Lab’s fastest servers. Once logged on, it may then take minutes for the Second Life virtual environment to load. It then may take several more minutes for a user’s inventory to load. The next slowest to load are the images on the surfaces in the virtual world which may take five or more minutes to load. And the slowest to load is the appearance of your avatar which may take twenty or more minutes to load. The visual appearance of a person’s avatar prior to loading is shown as a white cloud.
Linden Lab’s slow load speed harkens back to the days of using a dial up modem and watching the text and images of a web page slowly display. In this day of fast personal computers and fast Internet access, the only reason for this horrible Second Life experience must be Linden Lab’s slow servers. This slow load speed is particularly annoying in highly graphical environments like virtual world commercial venues where it can take five minutes or more for pictures of a vendor’s products to become visible.
If downloading the environment takes a long time, moving around the virtual world of Second Life is even worse. When a user utilizes an arrow key to move their avatar forward, it can sometimes take a full minute for the position of their avatar to update in the viewer. During this time, a user’s avatar may have moved a great distance, but this updated position is not displayed. This effect of this lag is to have the environment around your avatar jump on the screen, appearing to pass the same point in the simulation several times. This effect can be so annoying that sometimes users just take to standing still rather than struggling to position themselves near each other. Finally, it is common for Second Life servers to just crash, throwing every user out of a simulation at once. In some cases, this may transport all users to different location, or sometimes this logs everyone out of Second Life at once.
When using Second Life, it is clear that some locations in the virtual world are hosted on faster servers than others and so it is obvious that this problem can be corrected. In this day of distributed processing, cloud computing, and load balancing servers, these slow server response times and server instability are unacceptable. Further, as demonstrated when using much more sophisticated virtual worlds like Utherverse or Red Light District, I have never seen these kind of load speed issues or had performance lags occur at all. This just demonstrates that Linden Lab could fix these lag and instability issues with just the reinvestment of some of the money are making.