Information Week has an utterly fascinating article about the tech behind the Second Life experience. Of particular note, the machinery runs on 2000 CPUs. The article claims that it’s capable of 100K users at once, but the article talks about how the system is already showing signs of stress at its current peak (which the article reports as having a record of 36K users recently).

When residents buy a whole island, they get dedicated use of an entire Intel- or AMD-based server, with pricing based on the processor, memory, and storage of that server.

I found this interesting as well.

For now, Linden Lab is the only company that runs sims. It derives the majority of its revenue from land sales. However, that will change, as the company is committed to allowing others to run their own sims on their own servers.

While many Second Life residents are convinced that Linden Lab will release the server source code as open source, in fact that hasn’t been decided, said Miller. Linden Lab might simply decide to license the code to other companies, the way vendors now license any application. Linden Lab might publish all the APIs, and allow other companies to build clones of the Second Life sim software. Linden Lab might simply allow other companies to provide the hardware, which Linden Lab would run at its own co-location facility, running Linden Lab’s software. And there are other options as well, which Miller declined to elaborate on.

How severe are things? Well, free players may find themselves locked out.

As a stopgap measure to manage growth, Linden Lab said in mid-February that it might limit logins on the weekends,. Linden Lab said it might lock out some free accounts during periods of peak traffic, limiting access to the network to premiuum accounts — who pay $9.95 per month — and free accounts that have bought or sold Linden Dollars through Linden Lab. The announcement proved controversial, with some residents saying it was a sign that Second Life is collapsing.

And yes, leave it to the players to claim that server overload from the highest peak usage ever is a sign of the game’s impending demise. Still, read the article, it’s a very fascinating glimpse in one approach to build the back end for a game that is nothing but player created content.