Project Motivation

According to Zero Linden, the project was motivated by thoughts a year ago when Second Life was growing rapidly and Linden Lab was thinking about how to scale the grid.

There have been two timeframes set back then: The next few months and the next years. This architecture discussion is about the next years.

Scary numbers

If we assume that virtual worlds will be a significant part of the future, then the following numbers might not be so far off:

• 60 million regions (probably more) (60 was mentioned here by Zero Linden )
• 2 billion users
• 50 - 100 million concurrency (on whatever device)
• 20 thousand avatars per region (calculated here based on 2 bn users).

These numbers will not be possible with the grid right now and additionally some more use cases need to be solved like connecting 3rd party hosted regions to the grid.