Kitely worlds now start up to three times faster

Kitely, the cloud-based OpenSim grid known for its on-demand regions, rolled out an upgrade today that makes its worlds start up to three times faster, the company announced today.

Most Kitely worlds now start in less than 20 seconds, and even very complex worlds — with more than 100,000 objects and 15,000 scripts — start in less than 90 seconds, according to the announcement by Kitely co-founder and vice president for research and development Oren Hurvitz.

That means faster teleports and logins, the announcement said, and terrain and objects rez faster than before.

“We made major performance, security and stability upgrades to Kitely today,” Kitely co-founder and CEO Ilan Tochner told Hypergrid Business.

It’s the latest in a series of speed upgrades for the grid. Kitely doubled region performance in May 2024, sped up world startup times that summer, and said in April that all its worlds were up to 50 percent faster.

This time, the company moved to faster servers and now runs on .NET 10, Microsoft’s software framework, instead of Mono, according to the announcement.

There’s one catch. The first visit to a world after the upgrade will be slower than usual, because the world has to recompile its scripts for a new version of OpenSim, the company said.

That’s because Kitely also upgraded to OpenSim 0.9.3.0, the latest release, adding its own proprietary patches as well as patches from the OpenSim development branch, Tochner said. The grid now supports more OSSL scripting functions, and the full list is on the Kitely blog.

The new OpenSim version no longer supports the ODE physics engine, so worlds that still used it were automatically switched to ubODE, which Kitely patched to run faster.

The upgrade also fixes a problem that has dogged Kitely for more than a year — AI bots scraping its website, Tochner said.

“This traffic behaves like huge distributed denial-of-service attacks and sometimes causes server overloads that take down entire sites,” he said.

The bot traffic took Kitely offline several times over the past year, though the system usually recovered on its own within a few minutes, he said. It also overwhelmed Kitely’s main servers and caused frequent region restarts.

Kitely solved the problem by integrating Cloudflare with its own internally developed systems, Tochner said. As a result, visitors to Kitely Market or the Kitely forums may occasionally see a page asking them to confirm they’re human.

“As a result, Kitely once again provides the robust stability that we’ve been offering since 2011,” Tochner said.

Kitely also had to deal with this week’s PHP security problems. PHP is software that is used by the majority of websites on the Internet, and AI systems discovered new flaws.

The company took its forums and blog, both of which run on PHP, offline as soon as the security announcement came out, Tochner said.

“We then tasked Claude with tracking the patch releases,” he said. “Once they were available, Claude immediately patched our system and reactivated the forums and blog.”

You can watch the 80 bots video here: