Since this article is only about the technical side, let's add to this.
Another game has the same issue with loading times and general performance: The Sims series, until the 3rd.
The Sims 2 was excruciatingly slow when you had lot of elements on screen, even of fast computers.
The reason? It's a game in which people make their own "levels", by adding items, which can even be of external source. So it's hard to really scale for it like for other video games.
The Sims 3 is faster, improved performance a lot, mostly because it is streaming as much as it can, now. Most of the time you will see dirty loading polygons, blurry textures, before it loads. Because that's the only way to deal with a level on which you have no control.
The issue is the same with SL, with the increased fact that people can really create anything, import meshes, make objects from thousands of polygons. And they can run scripts in each of these polygons, potentially able to launch scans of the whole area several times per second.
I'm not saying that this is as optimized as it can get. But it's far from being a "laziness" issue. The basic problem doesn't really have an "easy solution".
Another game has the same issue with loading times and general performance: The Sims series, until the 3rd. The Sims 2 was excruciatingly slow when you had lot of elements on screen, even of fast computers. The reason? It's a game in which people make their own "levels", by adding items, which can even be of external source. So it's hard to really scale for it like for other video games.
The Sims 3 is faster, improved performance a lot, mostly because it is streaming as much as it can, now. Most of the time you will see dirty loading polygons, blurry textures, before it loads. Because that's the only way to deal with a level on which you have no control.
The issue is the same with SL, with the increased fact that people can really create anything, import meshes, make objects from thousands of polygons. And they can run scripts in each of these polygons, potentially able to launch scans of the whole area several times per second.
I'm not saying that this is as optimized as it can get. But it's far from being a "laziness" issue. The basic problem doesn't really have an "easy solution".