what’s the OpenSim equivalent to a Second Life sim? at i live in science land

what’s the OpenSim equivalent to a Second Life sim?

i have talked many times about what you need in OpenSim in order to have a region that is comparable to a sim in Second Life

there is no direct answer because there are many ways to deploy OpenSim. when you run it on a stick, your own machine, or even a server – you do everything that Second Life does (except commerce). you hold the account info, inventory, messaging, media, worldmap, and a few other things (databases) that Linden Lab handles with other servers in addition to the actual region server. InWorldz would be the closest to an architecture like Second Life although Tranq has refined that to be far more scalable and smart that the aging Second Life infrastructure design *kudos to Tranq!* =)

generally, one cpu core and one gig of RAM is about one SL sim. if you can get set-up with more RAM, you’ll be able to have more accounts, more inventory, and more concurrency (and more prims – 50 mb per 1,000 plain cubes vs. 150 mb per 1,000 for complex prims)

that’s all fine and well, but on LinkedIn someone asked about disk space and i have never thought about it much

Does anyone know how much server space a Second Life 15,000 prim private region is using? I’m looking at a VPS hosting service that offers from 20GB to 160GB of server space.

of course the answer to that is incredibly variable and here is how i answered and how subQuark (DM) did too. your experience would be great and let me know your thoughts in the comments

EH: great question and not an easy answer. remember that SL is using additional servers to host your inventory, account information, communication, media, and world maps so what an SL sim takes is less than what is needed by OpenSim

also it depends what your prims and textures are – if you never import textures it will be much smaller. if you use cubes rather than hollowed and cut tori, it will be smaller as well

we have 16 regions (sims) with about 40,000 pims rezzed out PLUS an inventory of 20,000 prims and i use about 120 GB of disk. that includes keeping some daily backups of regions and of the entire MySQL dbs. we have a physical server so it has to hold its operating system too (Win 2008 64-bit web edition)

there are only 6 accounts on it, but more accounts would require more space

my guess would be that for one region you could do with well under 50 GB (i think i only had 20 GB when i was with Reaction Grid 2 years ago and also had 16 regions but they ran as 4 megaregions)

knowing your needs would help guide you better than making a direct SL comparison. my overall rule of thumb is that one CPU core + one GB of RAM is close to one SL sim (our server is 4 core, 8 gig RAM, and 500 GB diskspace)

do you know about Kitely? it will soon have named user accounts in addition to FB login – kitely.com – it is the cheapest solution apart from running OpenSim on your own machine and connecting to OSGrid

great question and i’d say start on the low end and the expected number of visitors (concurrency) will be a factor as well (will they hypergrid over and thus not need to have all their inventory on your grid or will they make an account with you?)

maybe a crude way to test how much space you need is to use http://simonastick.com and build your region out and just see how big it becomes – crude but maybe indicative

good luck =D

>>>

DM: It is a good question and Ener’s response is correct. I looked at your profile Carla and I assume you may be wanting to do this for training?

I have been doing eLearning development for a few years including speaking at eLearning Guild conferences about the use of Second Life.

I now only use OpenSim for many obvious reasons and do so to create branched scenario video.

Depending on your needs, a physical server will always yield faster performance but that in itself may not be critical. The Kitely suggestion is a sound one and very economical.

However, I have held workshops with Ener’s sim-on-a-stick which was downloaded some 7,000 times last year and is in use by the US Air Force and by elementary students! Its applications are endless and work very well for some purposes.

Good luck with your endeavors and I hope you find OpenSim as enjoyable to use as both Ener and I have! (We work together on EnclaveHarbour.com)

>>>

EH: ha ha ha, you have to wake up early and drink a lot of joe to be faster than a speeding Ener! =D

we need to combine our responses into today’s blog post! =p

like anything, there isn’t a simple answer but the 20 GB would be a starting place and you should be able to scale up (i would think)

i have to say i am very spoiled with having our own server – it has run far better than anything i had in SL

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so there it is from LinkedIn and it’s probably a question a lot of “casual” users have. i say casual because you guys that read this blog tend to be pretty hardcore users with mad skillz! =)

i think the lady’s question is also indicative of people who found SL fun to use for training and now are looking for profitable ways to offer more in-depth virtual world solutions (like Rivers Run Red and their departure from SL, but on a smaller scale)

written by Ener Hax

February 28th, 2012 at 12:53 pm

posted in second life,virtual worlds

tagged with second life sim

Interesting, soon I will write an article about The Pros/Cons about Opensim and Second Life. But for me both are always good, opensim is good for one thing and Second Life too. Their strengths and weakness.

Xpontaneus

28 Feb 12 at 3:46 pm

Going by the size of folders, my AuroraSim version takes up 3.94Gb and my OpenSim versions is 2.84Gb, with the MySQL databases included. The AuroraSim version is a single region of 1024m square and the OpenSim version is 4 seperate regions. I’m going to give Kitely a try and so I’m building (loosely) themed region/worlds. More details soon :-D

Sarge Misfit

28 Feb 12 at 3:53 pm

that article will be a great insight to your experience with bot Xpontaneus, i look forward to reading it =)

i just checked our Sarge and for Enclave Harbour just our MySQL dbs total 3.67 gig for the 16 regions

your data and this confirm that not much is needed

our server has a total of 118 gig and that includes the server software and 8 full MySQL db backups plus two days of OAR backups

Ener Hax

28 Feb 12 at 5:43 pm

Thank you Sarge, we’re looking forward to your arrival.

We’re currently testing our next site update (that includes email/password, and Twitter integration) so, if there are no surprises, things should be ready for you to join the growing Kitely community by the end of this week. :-)

Ilan Tochner

28 Feb 12 at 6:04 pm

My wee linux cloud server has 20GB available. On it have 11.10 Ubuntu, MySql, Apache, PhP, PhpMyAdmin, Mono, and the most current version of OpenSim with 2 regions running on the bugger. One with with Linda Kellie’s Castle Oar on it (and a backup) (with some scripts I made) ,and a brand new construction region with very little on it. I have I have used only 2.3gig of that 20 available. I’m tracking about 3 to 5% cpu use per region (even if no one is on them), and about a 3 to 4% increase in cpu per avatar visit. My server has 4 Xen processors. I did make a big fire prim awhile back with animation and physical fire (bad Araxie), CPU shot way up, use phantom when moving objects. As I grow, I may look into splitting up the load with another cloud I have for other stuff. CPU is really the only concern I have.

Araxie Longoar

28 Feb 12 at 8:21 pm

I agree CPU is the main thing if your CPU is slower then 2.5 GHz then all the RAM in the world isn’t going to help I have an old dell running server 2008 with a 3GHz P4 hyperthreading and 2GB RAM and can run 3 regions on opensim