Second Life tops 50,000 concurrency
By Eric Reuters
As first reported in the Second Life Insider, over 50,000 avatars were online in the virtual world simultaneously for the first time yesterday. Usage peaked at a concurrency of 50,528 at 1:45pm Second Life Time (US Pacific) before beginning to fall. Catherine Smith, a spokeswoman for Linden Lab, confirmed the new record.
Second Life celebrated achieving 20,000 avatars online at once only nine months ago, on December 29 of last year. “Growth is often a double-edged sword,” said Pathfinder Linden at the time. “It is something to celebrate… But growth also poses challenges on how a community can scale, both in the technical and sociological aspects, and often involves some growing pains.”
The Insider’s Tateru Nino tracks Second Life’s usage figures closely. Second Life currently averages about 36,000 avatars online at any given point in time, Nino said, but both average and minimum concurrencies have been trending upwards recently.
The spike in concurrency comes after three months of peak usage hovering at or below 47,000 avatars.
“Usually, sudden jumps in peak concurrency — achieving a new plateau — are a sign that Linden Lab has done something behind the curtain that has improved the overall grid capacity,” Nino said. “Generally, as concurrency rises overall load on the grid increases. Things become slower, or more erratic, and as each person’s comfort zone is exceeded, they sign off.”
During yesterday’s record concurrency residents didn’t report problems, like slow rezzes and missing inventories, previously associated with lower usage figures.
Whether the record concurrency reflects an improved grid capacity, as Nino believes, or increased activity from Second Life’s residents, either way the numbers can only be interpreted as good news for boosters of Linden Lab’s virtual world.
