[Opensim-users] General question about opensim vs secondlife server side performance

[Gwyneth Llewelyn]

I haven't run "lots of scripts" on OpenSim, but I would certainly agree with Marcel: running two copies of the SL Viewer, one connected to SL, one to your laptop-hosted OpenSim, AND the standalone OpenSim on the same laptop is being too optimistic :) Just one of the viewers will take so much CPU (even though I believe the SL Viewer(s) don't use multiple CPUs...) that it will starve out the poor OpenSim application (and the database!) trying desperately to run with whatever CPU cycles are left.

As a comparison — and, again, I'm not running many scripts really — I have tried to run the same installation of OpenSim on a desktop iMac from early 2007 and a Pentium IV-based "server" (from around late 2008) which is only running Linux with OpenSim, MySQL, and nothing else besides. In both cases, all I have is two cores and 2 GBytes of RAM. But while the server has nothing else to worry about — no GUI — the iMac obviously has the whole of Apple's GUI stack running

The iMac barely handles a single region on OpenSim, even if I run the SL viewer from a different computer. The Linux box handles a 10-sim-minigrid without sweating. While everything on the iMac seems sluggish (but it certainly works!), there is little difference between regions hosted on the Linux box and Second Life, for a very low number of logged-in avatars. Perhaps the good thing about OpenSim is that hosting many regions with few avatars and few scripts will not make a huge difference at all: in theory, you could host hundreds of regions, assuming that you're just using one or two at the time :)

So I don't think that running so many things on a single laptop will give you reasonable performance on OpenSim, and the "competition" is unfair: the laptop is doing a ton of things already, and has few resources left for OpenSim. Specially if you're already running two instances of the SL Viewer on it...

On the other hand, I suppose that having a high-end, eight-core laptop with 8 GB of RAM and a dedicated graphics card might not create such an impact on OpenSim performance :)

	- Gwyn

On 2012/03/03, at 09:44, M.E. Verhagen wrote:

> Lindenlab uses high end dedicated servers.
> A laptop cannot compete with those ...