Textures in Second Life: Measurement and Analysis

We collected packet traces from second life client sessions and analyzed the packet contents. We observed that textures constitute a majority of the network traffic. We further characterized the textures from three selected regions in second life in terms of their size and spatial distributions. We found that textures in these regions exhibit a different size distribution from files on a file system or documents on the Web. We also verified the intuition that texture objects are spatially non-uniformly distributed. Surprisingly, we found that the selected second life regions can contain up to hundreds of megabytes of textures, and there exist locations in these regions that encompass a large portion of these textures within their area-of-interest. Our work motivates the need to manage textures carefully and efficiently in the design of networked virtual environments such as second life, and hints at the amount of storage and bandwidth required at a peer if peer-to-peer techniques are applied for texture caching. Our traces are useful for simulation studies and can lead to a model to generate realistic workload for networked virtual environments.