Second Life, the big-world virtual world, has recently been ported to AWS. In the last few weeks, the first user-accessible test regions have come up. The old system is hosted at a colo in Arizona. The new system is running on AWS-WEST-2.

The main result is that region crossings with vehicles are much faster, about 200-300ms instead of 1-3 seconds, and more reliable. This probably reflects that AWS has very high speed, low latency networking within their data centers.

Region crossings between region crossings on the old system and the new work, too. The systems are interconnected. So the cutover can be done slowly.

The takeaway from this is that the Second Life / Open Simulator architecture, a grid of regions 256 meters square, starts to perform almost to game levels with enough server and networking power behind it. Previously it appeared that a new architecture, maybe Spatial OS or whatever Dual Universe is using, would be needed to get big virtual worlds that didn't run slow. Maybe it just takes better networking hardware to scale.