Safe the Asset servers!

How about a "Safe the asset servers" week?

Following idea:
LL makes a statistic about load on the asset servers, how many billion items and traffic and stuff.
One week the population of SL will clean out there inventories, clean up textures (using the same texture when possible, reduce size of textures where theres not benefit of having big ones ) workshops teaching how to make asset server friendly stuff.
Maybe SL shops update old products to same funcionality but more asset server friendly and replacing it for free, nice advertisment...

Ad the end of the week LL gives out the statistics of the cleaner, faster and more stable asset servers, a lot of people learned how to make there builds more server friendly and a lot of people skip happily into the setting sun with clean organised and small inventories....

Mayybe LL counts up how much money was saved by cleaning up and gives the guys of the development an bonus to add a few extra hours for some funky new features in SL <wink>

SAVE the asset server I think you mean. "Safe" is "not dangerous."

I like the idea though.

Sorry, sometimes i still confuse the two, life and live is something i am mastered by now, most of the time.

The general idea of inventory cleanup is something that I'd encourage everyone to consider, and if LL decided to make a silly holiday week of it, then hey, rock on I say. If it works, do it.

Problem is you have a lot of people, especially older residents, whose inventories total up into the tens of thousands. Thats a very daunting number to look at beating down, no matter how much spare time you have. With that in mind I also submitted this suggestion:
/13/35/126923/1.html

Don't forget that all of that deleting activity happening at once might well comprise a much greater load on the asset server than normal levels. I'm not sure whether loading the inventory itself comes from the asset server, but I seem to remember hearing about the "inventory server", so that may not even be the same server.

From what I understand, the asset server is simply a place that stores every single object anyone's ever taken into inventory, deleted from in-world (which takes it into your trash), etc. Every time you want to rez an object, the sim you're in sees if it has a cached copy, and if not, it asks the asset server for a copy (you can see this as "Pending Downloads" in the control-shift-1 stats).

As near as I can guess, an object actually rezzed in a sim doesn't correspond to an asset on the asset server. Given the talk of "rollbacks" and "simstates", I'm guessing that all of the objects in a sim are stored into one big zipped up pile called a simstate whenever a sim is shut down.

Anyway, the point is that I'm guessing the load on the asset server comes from simply all the rezzing, deleting, and inventory-taking activity of residents happening at once, not the size of their inventories. The amount of assets in the world seems to be less of a problem... they can just add to their storage cluster. People have suggested in the Hotline in the past that we have a big inventory cleaning day, and LL has said that the load from a coordinated cleaning effort would make the problem worse.

That said, cleaning your inventory at some point would probably be a good idea, so as to reduce the load on the inventory server. Just don't try to get everyone to do it at once. It'd be like flushing all the toilets in the city at once.

as far as i remember the asset server is never cleaned, everything added stay in it, evenif you delete it from your inventory

Yeh, in particular textures need to remain in the asset server until there's no objects referencing them, and *checking* for references to textures is probably impossible... the references may be in scripts. So at the very least it's really hard to recover the space held by textures...

But textures are probably the biggest assets!

Actually, I remember reading something by a linden posted in the forums a few months ago. Apparently they can and do delete unused textures and such. They create a list of every key that's used in the entire grid, in any object, in any person's inventory item, and by scanning all scripts in any object or in any person's inventory item for asset keys. Anything not on the list gets nuked.

The Lindens could create a bounty for the number of items you delete from your inventory during a period of a week. You would get like $L1 for every 50 items you delete or something like that.

It would have to be a start-stop calculation:

user X has 121,412 items in its inventory at the beginning of the week
it has 79,301 items at the end of the week.

121,412 - 79,301 = 42111 items

42111 items / ($L1/50 items) = $L842

Not a bad bounty I'd say.

Most people are walking around with unbelievable amounts of stuff that they will NEVER EVER USE.

I believe that this was true, once.This is called "garbage collection", and it is a major topic in programming large systems with refrences [pointers] into lists of things-that-may-become-obsolete.I`m sure that they are.This is grossly oversimplified, but this IS essentially what they do.

Do you remember the recient rash of "missing from database" errors in-world lately? As I understand it, these were [and still are!] a side-effect from an experimental garbage collector. The GC program scans the asset database, tries to identify "garbage", and flags it for deletion. At this point, the information is only MOVED into alternate storage, not actually deleted. When a reference to the pretend-deleted item is accessed, the system throws the missing asset error, and this triggers a background process that restores the asset.

We all know about the asset server being overloaded lately. They are doing this in part because the asset server is overloaded, and they need to clean it up, which will in turn make it faster. They are doing it THIS WAY because garbage collection is a complex issue, and they want to make sure that they get it RIGHT before they go in and actually ERASE stuff.

This all assumes that I`m remembering details correctly, of course.

...and what do you do if the pointer is a string?

string texture = "5fc2b910-0ef0-9f3f-1311-dc170d37d191"
llSetTexture(texture, ALL_SIDES);

That UUID could be anything as far as garbage collection is concerned, it could be an avatar, object, texture, made up UUID for the purposes of llConvertToBase64.

(The UUID there I copied from a free texture I aquired that currently resides in my inventory and possibly on one or two objects I created which may or may not be rezzed).