In a welcome, but maybe geeky language blog post, Linden Lab provide information that they are Raising The Roof : The HTTP Project. This is good stuff and is the sort of blog post that I personally wish Linden Lab had been publishing for many a year. I appreciate that for some people the information isn’t easy to follow, but the bottom line is that this project should improve people’s Second Life experience.
The blog post includes a graph, which is extremely important because it demonstrates how the HTTP project has improved performance, particularly in areas such as texture fetching. This is where we come back to a pet peeve of mine, Linden Lab’s lack of communication. The reason I raise this is because when people have been having latency issues in Second Life in the past, one piece of advice has been to turn off HTTP textures. When you see where performance started with fetching HTTP textures, you can see why that may have made sense. However with the performance improvements the Lab are blogging about, turning off HTTP textures becomes less of a good piece of advice, although as the blog post points out, some matters are outside of LL’s control and therefore your mileage in performance may vary.