Wagner James Au / New World Notes

Linden Lab has a blog post that almost seems like a direct response to the one New World Notes posted yesterday, wondering whether the improvements to SL sim crossings in the test grid were a temporary, unintentional side effect. But as April Linden writes, they are real, and a result of changing some code in order to optimize how SL worked once it's deployed to the Amazon cloud:

When you crossed from one region to another, the regions were putting a lot of information into large packets and sending them across our network. This was usually okay because our network was purposefully built to run Second Life. Then, as soon we tried to do this on someone else’s network (in the cloud), things didn’t work quite right. The problem was most noticeable when crossing from a region in our data center to one in the cloud…

[O]ur engineering team decided to use another way to send the data across the network, using the same protocol and method we use for other types of data. Most importantly, it is faster and more reliable. That did the trick! We’re still collecting statistics on the impact this change has, but things are looking very positive.

Once this new code was written, the performance when going  from region to region got a lot better, and it worked between our data center and the cloud! The improvement was so dramatic that we decided to not make our Residents wait for uplifted simulators, and rolled the changes out right away. That code is what rolled out to the grid this week.

More intensely geeky details here. So the improvements are based not so much on cloud deployment itself, so much as they are based on improvements made to the codebase in order run well on the cloud.