Information Week Article: A look at the technology

This article describes what happens under the hood, as well as how Linden Lab is planning to handle hundreds of times the traffic.

Inside Second Life's Data Centers
As Second Life strains to keep up with recent popularity, InformationWeek looks at the real-world technology foundations of the make-believe world, and developer Linden Lab's plans to stay on top of growth.
Mitch Wagner InformationWeek
March 5, 2007

Even while Second Life struggles with its explosive growth and new popularity, the developers of the service, Linden Lab, are redesigning the service to handle hundreds of times as much traffic as it's dealing with today.

Second Life is seeing 20% monthly growth in the number of concurrent users, going from a then-record 18,000 users logged in at once in December to a record 36,000 on Sunday. The maximum capacity of the current network is 100,000 simultaneous users, Miller said. (the rest)