[Opensim-dev] Opensim-dev Digest, Vol 6, Issue 5

[Dalien Talbot]

On Feb 4, 2008 2:44 PM, Dr Scofield <hud at zurich.ibm.com> wrote:

> Michael Wright wrote:
> > I think really we should be trying to go in the other direction and
> > seeing if we can move anything that is currently grid based to being
> > more distributed. I'm so against the idea of everything being central.
> > (unless there is no other way)
> quite agree. ideally, we would be able to add "region links" to
> standalone grids, instead of running in "grid mode". yes, a region link
> would be more than just a link to another region, it would have to
> include information about remote asset server, agent server, etc. then
> there's the question of geography/topology...
>

In the extreme case, there are no grids whatsoever - just standalone sims,
which hold the information to the standalone asset/agent,etc. servers.

I think I already sent this link of my experiments with this extreme case:
http://daltonic.blogspot.com/2007/11/interdomain-teleports-revised.html

It's indeed in no way how it *will* be done, the interdomain teleport is
much more than just hopping the client from sim to sim - and as we were
discussing, in the first phase maybe a simple "flattening" of the various
grids together would do the trick to allow to work out the various
surrounding issues.

I said it not once, and will repeat this - the concept of "grid" is not
scalable to the large size (hundreds of thousands of regions) in the case of
separately-administered and separately provisioned servers - it is a point
of concentration of big network and CPU load and admin overhead. The only
reason for it to exist would be the monetary - however, I think the business
model would be more interesting around the content hosting
(asset/inventory/sim hosting) rather than the grid as such - the UGA is a
necessary evil to glue together the disparate sims for the start.

Indeed all of this rant-ish stuff is not an intent to ditch the concept of
grid altogether - there is definitely a place for the "distributed flat
world of a small scale". Just that we should not keep it as the only usage
scenario.

/d
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