Asset Servers

In my "Snippets on Friday" post of March 21th I pointed out there were some fears LL was going to obsolete the asset servers and replace them with a distributed database hosted on the sim servers.

Reading comments and talking to people about the isssue I already got the impression this scenario was rather unlikely. Today that was confirmed as Tess Linden was kind enough to reply to an email of mine with this statement:

"Our cluster of Isilon asset servers are not going away with this new
release. We are not adding distributed databases on the simulator
hosts. We're adding small distributed web services in front of our
central *database*, which is different from the central asset servers
and different from distributed databases on sim hosts. This would allow
requests to the database to be cached more coherently.

The current architecture will begin to hit the limit in terms of
scalability and this is a large effort to try to maintain that, to bring
better experience to the residents."

Thank you Tess for sheding some light on the issue.

Tess is a Software Developer at Linden Lab working primarily on the distributed server components. She's been at Linden for 2 and a half years.