Proposal: Modernizing Mainland Infrastructure with Mesh Roads & Cloud Optimization

Our current Mainland road system relies heavily on ancient, prim-based geometry. A typical legacy prim road segment eats up anywhere from 15 to 24 Land Impact (LI) (averaging about 19.5 LI).

If Linden Lab replaces these obsolete prim roads with highly optimized, modular 1-prim mesh roads, the grid-wide resource reclamation is staggering.

The Infrastructure Math

There are over 9,300 Linden-owned regions on the grid, with thousands dedicated to Mainland infrastructure and roadways. If we conservatively estimate an average of 15 road segments per roadside region:

Current Prim Road Total: ~2,340,000 LI

Optimized Mesh Road Total: ~120,000 LI

Total Grid Capacity Saved: 2,220,000 Land Impact points.

Why Doing Nothing Costs More Than Fixing It

In an AWS cloud hosting environment, Linden Lab pays directly for compute cycles, memory tracking, and physical server overhead. Legacy prim roads use complex, outdated bounding physics boxes that the simulation physics engine must calculate constantly. Multiplying this unoptimized physics lag across the entire Mainland translates into a silent, ongoing premium on the Lab's monthly AWS hosting bill.

Updating this does not require a massive team. Linden Lab can hire a single contract developer or assign one LDPW (Linden Department of Public Works) mole for a short-term, 3-month project.

The Task: Create a modern, low-impact 1-prim mesh road system, write a background deployment script to pull coordinates, and swap out the old geometry grid-wide.

The Investment: A minor, one-time project expense.

Immediate Server Cost Reductions: Slashing the grid infrastructure load by 94.9% slashes simulator memory bloat and lowers AWS compute costs instantly. The project pays for itself in infrastructure savings.

Unlocking New Revenue: By freeing up over 2.2 million prims previously wasted on legacy asphalt, the Lab can redistribute that capacity. Adding a minor "Infrastructure Prim Bonus" to paying Premium or Premium Plus tiers would give basic accounts a massive, tangible reason to upgrade—driving new Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR).

Leaving the old prim infrastructure in place is a permanent drain on server resources and cloud budgets. Spending a small amount upfront to deploy highly optimized mesh roads fixes physics lag, lowers hosting costs, and cleans up the grid for everyone.