Second Life's Second Innards

Talking of guts, here's a piece about Second Life's intestines. I've written about this in various places, but there are more details here:

Second Life runs on 2,000 Intel and AMD servers in two co-location facilities in San Francisco and Dallas. The company has a commitment to open source, with servers running Debian Linux and the MySQL database. Linden Lab chose Debian Linux because the software is suited to scaling massively with a small IT staff, said Linden Lab CTO Cory Ondrejka. MySQL allows the server farms to scale horizontally, by adding large numbers of low-power servers as needed, rather than vertically, which would have required Second Life to run on a few, powerful systems, Miller said.