in October of 2009 i dipped my avatar’s toe into OpenSim. it sucked and i was too busy in Second Life to give OpenSim more thought
fast forward to february 25th, 2010 and my official last day as an estate owner inSL. i wasn’t certain what i was going to do – i loved building but after having 19 sims, one minuscule Linden home just wasn’t going to cut it. luckily, subQuark had already started Enclave Harbour and was in his fourth month
did i think OpenSim still sucked? yes i did!
i knew some of that was just the change and losing all my inventory, but i soon realised that the lure of unlimited megaprims was not quite what i had read about – 60,000 prims per sim - wow, that should be paradise! =)
*record scratch* =(
i soon came to the point where i was having to reboot a virtual server as many as 5 times an hour! if three people came to visit me, i’d crash! OpenSim was so terrible . . .
or was it? o_O
slowly, i learned about hardware and realised that what i was trying to do on the resources that subQuark had simply would never work
at that time, no one was actually saying what their hardware would support – just what OpenSim could do
i started to realise that Second Life’s hardware model of one core and one gig of RAM gives you about 55 avatars, 15K prims, and 500 scripts (stats from the best sim i had inSL). this 1:1:1 rule was close but several tasks – inventory, world map, IM, voice, media, groups, and search are off loaded to dedicated servers and not part of your overhead inSL
OpenSim actually did not suck – only the way i was using it sucked! (or should i say “over using” it – i was the one who sucked!) =D
when we moved to SimHost i had a much better grasp on what we could run. 4 cores and 8 gig of RAM did not mean we could have 16 regions analogous to SL sims. it’s closer to 4 full sims and maybe 4 homesteads all spread out. and 16 regions does not mean 16 x 55 avatars either!
today we have even more options, from Sim-on-a-Stick which depends on the host machine’s hardware to OpenSim hosting like SimHost‘s dual quad core with 24 meg RAM to dual core In-Worldz regions to Kitely‘s cloud of 4×4 advanced megaregions, and many more
but . . . it is still up to the user to be educated enough to determine if what is hyped is reality. yes, we initially had 16 regions on one CPU core and one and a half gigs of RAM but OpenSim sucked with that anemic environment
1) understand that hardware is a limiting factor and 2) don’t be shy to ask what you can expect. everyone’s needs are different and fortunately we have wonderful choices – matching your choice with your expectations will mean that OpenSim rules and that you’ll be happy =)
as always – caveat emptor and caveat venditor
I’ve been using opensim for a couple of years and I know for me it’s been very frustrating trying to figure out basics such as “I have X hardware, what can I expect to do with it”. About the only clear and consistent answers I seem to have is that
a)when it comes to opensim, there’s no place like 127.0.0.1 !
b)if your internet connection is less than half a meg up, don’t bother. And a meg a sec up might even be considered minimal now. Every now and then I hook up to osgrid from my home just to re-experience the frustration of constant ack timeouts.
c)my vps (not yours, not anyone elses) can comfortably hold 4 sims and only use up 1 gig out of 2, and when it gets down to 700 megs free it’s time to reboot.
All of those I’ve figured out by trial and error. When it comes to the consumer side of opensim, it seems like the answer you’re most likely to get is -go get a sim provider and don’t worry about it.
Han Held
12 Oct 12 at 12:31 am
good point about connectivity and i am spoiled with fiber optic (it’s actually $20 cheaper than cable in my area!)
broadband speed and ping times are just as important because slow for either means lots of frustration for the end user =(
Ener Hax
12 Oct 12 at 7:19 am
“OpenSim actually did not suck – only the way i was using it sucked!”
Much like the so called KFC “Secret Recipe”, I found Opensim’s hardware requirement to be a bit of a mystery.
My initial experiences of Opensim was poor. I tried to be clever, monitored hardware usages and bumped it a little.
All should be good right? Wrong.
Eventually I settled on roughly the following hardware formula for Opensim:
(Avg Ram usage x 2) + 4GB + “An amount till it was stable”GB + 2GB + Largest CPU that seemed affordable.
My analogy: Opensim is like a medium sized car. But it needs a 4 lane motorway to itself to get from A to B.
What is the Opensim Secret Recipe?
Breen Whitman
12 Oct 12 at 7:19 am