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22 Comments

  1. I have been in OSgrid for years. I have actually a very large inventory. I have never lost anything to speak of that I have noticed and rarely get a problem. My inventory loads pretty quickly most of the time and while it is true Opensim can be deployed at all levels it scales well for commercial use or there would be no commercial grids like Kitely using it. Inworldz is no longer Opensim of course so they may be different or better or worse. What matters at the end of the day is if the software works well enough and Opensim has proved to do that fine for most people.

    1.  I think the biggest thing most don’t see is the traffic Gaga. There’s almost a magic number when it comes to where you start to see the scale up model no longer work… between 275-300 concurrency (actual people, not bots). When that starts happening, you start seeing a massive load on the database. Then take maybe 10% of those people running at inventories larger than 80k items, and it starts to meltdown. This isn’t just true with InWorldz, it’s happened with other grids when they hit that amount of concurrency.

      I wouldn’t presume to speak for Kitely, as only Ilan knows what he’s reworked to work within the cloud structure. Only time will tell if those numbers hold true for them as well when their concurrency gets to that level.

      1. Well yes. Kitely has now separated their asset database to another cloud server if I remember rightly and this must be entirely possible for commercial grids running Opensim. For small standalones it will probably never be needed. The point is, Elenia Inworldz is doing a pretty fine job but I have always felt you put down Opensim as if to boost Inworldz code. You know, we have argued this point in the past and the recent comments in response to Maria carried a lot of that mud slinging against Opensim and OSgrid. I just think the ill will generated is a let down to the whole Metaverse and will only serve to put people off coming to join us. I have tried to make my own peace with Inworldz in the past year because I think we can be better than SL collectively.

        1.  And that’s why I pointed out it’s absolutely excellent for the smaller grids and standalones.

          The comments on the other article were more due to the discrepancies in the article, which is easy to understand if you’re not a regular resident they aren’t obvious. And yes, there was quite a rift formed which is why we contacted Maria privately. This blog is the culmination of those talks.

          The MetaVerse is a big wide open space, much like the internet it’s on, and has a lot of growth to go yet, and whole new markets and concepts to be discovered. And I don’t see any one single company being able to do it all, so there’s lots and lots of room for growth, both tech wise and creativity wise.

          1.  I am glad Maria published your response Elenia and it really is a breath of fresh air over all after a distressing few days in which I felt an new rift opening up. I really didn’t want to see that happen when we have all been making serious progress on all fronts. SL is loosing hundreds of sims and the open Metaverse is growing.

            Dare I say it?

            We need to grow closer together too.

            Thank you Elenia *smiles*

          2. Most welcome, we’re very glad she published it as well and gave us the opportunity to mend some bridges at the same time.

          3. er2914a@yahoo.com'

            The best Grid Idea ever born. One of the best developers of viewers I know. The foundation is wonderful. and it will become the best system around in the future. But! Growing Pains
            one wonders after 6 months of IW looks at the people being run off of IW by the big owners and close friends of one of a founder sad to see the founder say these are my friends they will run the show you don’t like it your black listed. and so to all the people that been run off by the wicked witch of the west and her dear friends don’t waist your time bringing a product here as long as this one founder tries to let her close RL friends Ban there competition harass you and steel your designs. . The fact is no lag and a million prims and the finest grid ever designed has been spoiled by taking sides and hurting the people that pay the bills of inworldz grow up inworldz stop running people off because they are not your real life friend.
            Yes I know this sounds like a pissed off avi but tell you the truth go there and be the in-croud or be left behind.
            The fact is this has created another market that has to smile and hide from a micro managing Of the wicked witch . wow how does any body get there root prim attached to. only admin can do that.
            keep it up Inworldz there will be no more Luring them in.

          4. OMG I waited for 2 of my grad students to come inworldz we are putting together a media class there I started trying to explain what to do a over heated hall monitor. they call mentors ejects me while talking my class in you know what IW grow up you stop running the thinkers off.
            you may want to make a landing area for people that don’t want to put up with the Nazi mentality of your little police that ruined my class and ruined my work for the night shame on you mentor.

    2. ilan@kitely.com'

      Hi Gaga,

      While OpenSim has improved a great deal since Inworldz forked their codebase from it, it still suffers from several architectural limitations, manly around how it handles assets and inventory. Inworldz chose to resolve those limitations using their proprietary asset and inventory servers and we at Kitely have developed our own proprietary solutions for those limitations as well.

      We’re already using our own cloud-based solution for asset handling which automatically scales with load. Part of the work we did for the asset handling was in preparation for moving to cloud-based handling of inventory as well, so we can complete development within a few weeks if the need arises. For the time being, inventory handling is not creating a lot of load on our grid servers so we prefer to focus on other user-facing features first. We do, however, plan to replace the standard OpenSim inventory service with a more scalable system before it starts effecting performance.

      To summarize, OpenSim, in its current standard configuration, is great for many things but still needs work on improving some key architectural components before it can scale while maintaining consistently good performance. Kitely has done work to resolve those issues and other OpenSim-based grids with competent developers can do the same.

      1.  Hi Ilan

        Yes, I said as much in my reply to Elenia so thank you for expanding on it and clarifying.

        BTW, I have now joined Kitely and visited using Twitter.

        I will be blogging soon about Kitely and Inworldz

        Gaga

      2. Thank you for sharing your experience Ilan. I think this helps to confirm what we’ve done was well as work that will need to be done in the future. As always, it’s been a pleasure sharing experiences and statistics with you. I hope the collaboration and information sharing can continue into the future.

        Sincerely,
        – David

        1. ilan@kitely.com'

          Thank you Tranquillity,

          I agree, our collaboration can help benefit the development of Inworldz, Kitely and the metaverse community at large.

          I look forward to working together and hope that one day people will be able to easily teleport between Inworldz and Kitely using a safe and content-rights-respecting method.

  2. Great post Elenia. It clears up so much bogus information that people tend to throw around. I do wish that people would realize when writing about InWorldz that they are a company and should be treated the same as any other company and find out the facts before posting and doing damage to a business. 
    About the inventory issue: I do wish that OpenSim inventory worked as well as InWorldz. I rarely lose anything in my inventory in OSGrid but I do get things coming back to me all the time and I have things doubled and tripled. Even no copy things that I have picked up along the way will end up being in my inventory a few times in a few different places. What is even worse is that people who pick up my creations and then delete or return them (not sure which) it will end up back in my inventory showing them as the owner. I spend hours and hours just sorting and having to look at the properties of every item to see if I am the owner of the stuff in my own inventory. And with an inventory of about 17 thousand items now it’s frustrating. I’m loving OSGrid and hypergrid. But more and more I am craving the structure and the stability on InWorldz.Not missing SL even a little bit though. :) 

    1. jigs@westernprairies.net'

       You get inventory back because in OSgrid you have to go to the web site, log in and empty the trash THERE, emptying trash in-world in your inventory window does not work and will not ever function that way.

  3. A few points.

    * I don’t think that technical like-for-like comparisons between ‘closed’ grids and ‘open’ grids like OSGrid are particularly fair.  Whilst ‘closed’ grids control all their simulators, ‘open’ grids like OSGrid allow third parties to hook up their own systems. 

    This means that the ‘open’ grid experience is at the mercy of people running OpenSimulator on very different hardware (some of which may be underpowered) and on very different networks, which will affect simulator to grid service operations (e.g. inventory) as well as simulator to simulator operations (e.g. teleporting).

    As an aside, ‘open’ and ‘closed’ are not meant as pejorative terms – they are just the ones that came to mind when I first wrote about this [1].  As I also wrote in the reference, I think ‘open’ and ‘closed’ grids fulfill different needs and both are equally valid.

    * I think of running a medium-sized grid akin to running a pretty big website at this point.  There is a lot that you have to do behind the scenes to keep things running smoothly.  Big websites spend a lot of time on their architecture.

    To be honest, the default services that come bundled with OpenSimulator are probably never going to let you run a mega-huge grid (though they will get better over time).  And that was never their intention – they exist as enough to get you going and quite happily run smaller-scale installations.

    Rather the scalability is left to dedicated third-party projects.  For instance, SRAS (Simple Ruby Asset Service) [2] is an open-source Ruby on Rails replacement ROBUST asset service that can plug straight into core OpenSimulator and provide asset deduplication, compression, etc. (it’s used by OSGrid, amongst others).  Since SRAS runs on webservers such as Apache rather than on the possibly unoptimized embedded C# webserver used by OpenSimulator, it performs much better.  However, it is arguably more complex to get up and running and to maintain so it’s not something that can be an OpenSimulator default.

    This is exactly the kind of thing that happens on large websites (Facebook, Twitter, etc.).  They spend a lot of time on performance and plumb in a large number of different projects.  And from all that I know, a large number of these projects are open-source.

    This isn’t to say that there aren’t improvements that need to be made to core OpenSimulator to make it work better with services.  But these will happen over time as people come to grips with the problem in many different contexts and contribute knowledge and code, whether their other components are open-source or proprietary.

    * Which brings me on to a more philosophical point.  I believe that companies work best in an ecosystem if they share a lot of the base technology as open-source.  That’s not to say I have anything at all against proprietary software – indeed the website examples I quoted have a good proportion of that as their special source.  But at the same time they make use of and contribute a good proportion of their work as open-source.

    My belief is that this is essential to build a healthy virtual world/environment ecosystem (as opposed to a single game system).  I don’t think any single company will be dominant in this space in the long term – the risks are high and the network effects are potentially large (e.g. being able to use the same viewer across multiple systems, hypergrid or similar systems).

    So in the long term I think using and helping to improve open-source VE/VW projects, whether server or viewer-side reduces a project’s operating costs, keeps them compatible with other systems (if such is desired) and allows them to spend time innovating in their own specific area (whether technical or in areas such as community building).  But I accept that this is a personal point of view with many nuances and counter-arguments.

    * Lastly, regardless of whether Maria’s report [3] was accurate or not, I do want to say that I was disappointed by many of the comments making comparisons between InWorldz code and OpenSimulator.  OpenSimulator 0.6.5, for instance, was released in May 2009 – almost 3 years ago.  Since then there has been an enormous amount of improvement in core OpenSimulator in features, bug fixes and code refactoring.

    I’m quite happy to see informed and evidence-based criticisms of current OpenSimulator code and performance – after all, that’s the only way we get better.  But comments that just assert that the code is poorly performing or a conceptual mess without giving any evidence to back those statements up are, to my mind, rather pointless.

    [1] http://justincc.org/blog/2008/04/24/open-grids-and-distributed-asset-systems/
    [2] https://github.com/coyled/sras

    1. jim@gridmail.org'

       I completely agree that comparisons between open and closed grids is not very fair or appropriate.  But not really for technical reasons.  They serve different purposes, and they serve different markets.  It would be completely inappropriate for me as someone interested in one purpose and market to suggest that the other type of grid completely change what it’s doing, because it’s not the purpose and market that I’m interested in.  And to abandon all the work done so far.  But that’s open grids vs. closed grids.

      Similarly, when discussing which server codebase to use for a large concurrency grid (of either kind), the trade-offs are very different than those of smaller, run-at-home grids, or even smaller grids that run in the cloud and server less than 250 concurrent users.  Those grids simply don’t need all the highly-scalable components that grids like InWorldz and Kitely have developed.  MySQL is fine for small- to mid-sized concurrency.  Passing XML around all over the place, even between components within a single machine, is fine as well.  It creates problems under higher load, but unless the open grids take off dramatically, the priorities for those open grids lie elsewhere.  It makes sense that the spread of items and users across grids is one of the higher priorities there.  And other user-requested features can sit closer to the top as well.

      However on a closed grid where there is an economy and significant investment of content/IP, this is not the case.  Reliability, scalability, redundancy, content protection, land access controls, security of the servers, etc… these are all the highest priorities.

      On open grids, the content is portable. OAR files are common, and people know how to load them and save them on their own home-based regions.  It’s all about sharing and extending access.  It’s the complete opposite.  On closed grids, it’s all about knowing that the grid administrator (someone other than you) has protected your investment of time and money through backups, redundant hardware, reliability and scalability.  And that the grid is there for the long term.

      There are very different goals here. They serve different purposes and markets.  It’s okay to like both philosophies.  In the future I see them working together.

      1. freddleftwich@gmail.com'

        “In the future I see them working together.”

        I hope so Jim.  It is totally understandable why you have a vested interest in the proprietary technology of Inworldz.  For you to be professional and committed to your employer there is really no other alternative.  To be honest, I logged in recently and noticed a *significant* performance difference compared to normal usage on OpenSim (well OSgrid).  There is good work being done for sure.

        I can’t help but think of OS/2 Warp.  It was amazing technology at the time, better than Microsoft’s.  Certainly the product of a lot of talented developers at IBM.  But where is it now? Yes, some vestige remains, but it was ultimately relegated to a footnote in the history of OSes.

        But I think you are a forward thinker.  I get the feeling you have a perspective to offer Inworldz that may allow them to integrate (maybe delegate) key developments into the future of the metaverse that will allow Inworldz to realize profit while navigating in harmony with the general trend instead of swimming upstream against it.

  4. By the way Linda, I believe the bug where you end up getting copies of items that other people pick up is fixed in OpenSimulator 0.7.3 and later.  Sims on osgrid might still be running older code as a forced upgrade hasn’t been required for a long time. 

    1. All of my sims are 7.3 but I guess maybe someone is deleting/returning them from a sim running an older version since OSGrid doesn’t control which version people choose to use on their own hosted sims. 
      It’s not really an issue for me now that I am changing course but thanks for addressing it. 

  5. I have been using opensimulator as a way to understand how a virtual world grid architecture is working as I develop my own grid.  Ive also watched how both SecondLife and Inworldz have been operating.  I would say this however,  in my studying and watching I would be more apt to agree with Justin.  Inworldz and Opensimulator should not be compared as they both have two separate goals. However one thing I did notice is the confusion about what Opensimulator version Inworldz is running could easily be solved.  Inworldz in my opinion is not running the stated version of 0.6.5.  I can say this because I remember getting quite annoyed when I couldn’t get that version to work even after I followed all the directions and then finally got it to work after taking a break.  I would say that Inworldz is trying to implement its own grid architecture while using opensimulator as its base.  Therefore what version of opensimulator wouldn’t and shouldn’t matter as its a closed grid.  All the founders need to do is fix the default library name in the inventory to not show Opensim Library and that will solve that confusion.  Their simulators servers show Inworldz 0.7.0 as the server version which does seem correct and they are making improvements.  Keep up the good work.

  6. jigs@westernprairies.net'

    I see the other threaded article is locked now, some were posting these humongously insanely long comments there that scrolled down 3 screens worth of solid wall text, maybe a post comment length maximum would be a good idea to have. One post there is 142 lines long, 3,244 words and almost 20,000 chars-  no one is going to sit there and read a web site version of the monumental book  “War and peace”!

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