Does size matter?

With LL's efforts to increase stability of the grid, I've often wondered whether there will come a time where limits will be placed on the size of one's inventory. Perhaps, hard limits on basic accounts vs premium?

I know there are processes in place to currently implement things such as per parcel script limits as well as relegating underused inventory assets into a different asset server so I wonder if this is something in LL's radar. I know it would be a highly unpopular measure and probably difficult to implement in a fair manner.

My understanding is that the number objects in your inventory may not be completely precise as it only reflects the number of items downloaded to your viewer, according to the SL wiki. Also I'm not sure just basing limits strictly on the number of items in your inventory would be a fair metric anyways as I'm pretty sure a one prim default box wouldn't take up as much server space than say a highly textured, multi prim linked object. I'm sure folks above my pay grade could weigh in on this better than I could.

So my poll asks how many items you have in your inventory as I'm curious to see if anyone has any crazy numbers. Your length of time in SL would also be interesting to know in comparision to your inventory size. Think limits of some form to your inventory size is something LL might be thinking about? Weigh in!

Your inventory is just a list of links. You can have 30,000 items in your inventory, but unless you actually created new assets (eg, modifying modifiable wearables, uploaded textures, created notecards or scripts) you're not actually using up any more space on the asset server than someone with 300 items.

2 years and about 15,000 items right now. *sigh* I need to do some cleaning to bring that number down again.

I don't know if this is technically possible or not, but I wish there my inventory had a separate tab that worked like my RL attic. I would like a long term storage space for things I don't want to get rid of, but also don't need easy access to. I would be willing to trade longer load times for those items if having them in deep storage made my regular inventory less taxing on the system. It would make dealing with my inventory easier too, from an item management standpoint. Regular inventory searches wouldn't even look for those items, or pop open the folders they were in unless I was rummaging in my virtual attic. Items in the attic wouldn't be usable from that tab, but would have to be "restored" to my regular inventory the same way an item can be restored from my trash folder.

Like I said, don't know if this would be technically possible, or if it would help with server/viewer load issues, but a girl can dream.

Ah that makes sense! I knew someone could explain this better than I could. I wonder though if there might eventually be some other visible metric such as "you are using XXXX GB" for what space you are using and impose limits that way. I don't know much about all the technical stuff but I'm thinking along the lines of something like photo hosting sites where a basic user is allowed so much free space to store their pictures and if you want more space to host your pics you have to pay up. Would it be a technical nightmare to impose something like this? (/me hopes it is looking at his inventory size)

Well, it's all shared, so they'd have to actually walk everyone's inventory and see who's linking to what and allocate responsibility for the space among the people who have links to it. You can't just go by creator: if you upload a picture, and give it to someone, and then delete it from your inventory... it will be in the asset server as your asset, but in their inventory... on the other hand if you modify a script then you've got a unique copy of that script but don't show up as the creator. And then there's that dress with 3 huge textures and an animation... does that count as 3MB of data or a few kilobytes for the clothing layers, prims, and script?
I vote for "technical nightmare".

Actually, that makes no sense. Those items have to have a stored description so that they can actually be rezzed/used/whatever and your inventory list has to have the links to those descriptions stored.

This is very possible these days, but also does require software to manage it and most of those software products are not real cheap, nor easy to develop your own.

Basic, been here 3 years, just short of 25K items in inventory today, sometimes spikes over 35K if I am doing a lot of building work.

I am a content creator. I make textures for builders and I build whole-sim and multi-sim projects for Universities and individuals alike. If they try instituting account limits on inventory based on being Premium or not, and I can't get to inventory I paid for, I'm leaving. Period. That isn't an incentive to upgrade, it is extortion.

I have ZERO reason to buy a Premium Membership. I do not want and will not buy Mainland. Any insistance on TAKING AWAY current rights and abilities and reserving those only for "Premium Members" fails to take into account that there are a LOT of people like me who contribute a great deal to SL, but who have no reason to be Premium.

That description is the "asset". If I have an asset in my inventory, and give you a copy, we both have the asset in our inventories, but there's still only one copy of it on the asset servers.

So who gets charged for the item against any hypothetical inventory quota? Me, You, half and half?

If you go on a hunt and get 300 pairs of shoes, you get an extra 300 links in your inventory, but until you unbox them and start modifying them, they don't take up any more space on the asset server. If you decide you're giving up shoes before you unbox them, and delete them all, you haven't saved any space on the asset servers.

Didn't they make some recent changes to put items on a bulk storage server that hasn't been used (from your inventory)in a long time?

Gotcha - now I see what you meant and you are correct in that case. Until I rez it and change it, I'm still referencing the original stored description.

That would explain a lot of the inventory losses people took a while ago that were on really old items.

FJ Linden talked about that in a few of his blog posts about the bulk storage servers for infrequently used assets but I'm unclear as to whether it has been fully implemented as of yet.

They have been putting assets that don't appear to be used anywhere into long-term storage... preparatory to purging... for some time, but I don't believe that this is based on how recently an item has been accessed. As I recall, it's for assets that:

1. are not in anyone's inventory.
2. are not in-world.
3. are not referenced (eg, as a texture) from any asset in category 1 and 2.
4. are not in the contents of any prims in category 1 and 2.
5. are not referenced or in the contents of any objects in category 3 and 4
6. are not referenced by UUID in scripts or notecards in categories 1-5.
7. All the above categories are applied recursively.

The process of analyzing all the objects in the world and tagging assets is time-consuming, so new objects are created and deleted while it's going on, and so even if there's no bugs in the code (and of course there may be) you could still get false positives. So when that happens, they can move assets back from long-term storage.

Unless I'm missing something....isn't this basically a description of the way Storage Prims work? (Aside from the 'separate tab' in the Inventory part.)

I have several dozen Storage Prims. Each holds about 50 items, all fitting some general category (such as 'Roof and balistrade pieces relating to Nautilus City Build' or the like). If I think I might want to use any of those items I rez the Storage Prim and look in the contents to see if what I want is there. If so, I do have to put all 50 back into my Inventory, but of course I can reload the Storage Prim and delete the ones I'm not using from Inventory.

The only tricky thing is to remember NOT to mix and match permissions within one Storage Prim (if I put one No Modify item inside it turns the whole thing into No Modify. I just have separate Storage Prims for the No Modify, and for the Copy/Modify but No Transfer, etc. etc.)

???

Apart from having to rez them in world and risk losing the lot to a glitch when you want to put stuff into them.

You are right, storage prims work basically that way. However, the prims themselves still have to be cataloged in my main inventory, and have to be rezzed then opened to be looked through. My scenario was a "dream system" so it adds being able to browse through them in folders without rezzing anything, all of that integrated into the viewer.

In addition, since boxes can't contain subfolders, I don't find it very useful for things like outfits, or products I have sorted into sub categories. In a box they are all jumbled together, making it harder to find the pieces I want to take out, or create a separate box for each outfit/product color.

Also, though I do occasionally use some storage prims, I've read about items being lost which are stored this way. The asset server is much more reliable now than it was at the time that sort of things was reported, so it is likely perfectly safe. I am being too cautious there, I admit.

I have about 71k of items, all organized. About 10% of the items are from creators that are no longer in world, and I archived them before the creators left. When ever I see a creator talking about exiting, I will try to purchase as many of their items as I can, especially items I feel are specially theirs.

But I also have all the looks, outfits, accessories and items I need to make my special look each day that I change it.

Outfits that I purchase that just do not work for any of my looks go either into a folder for give-a-ways, or are deleted.

The main thing I have found that if you keep the default primary folders mostly empty, you will not have any extra problems with 'lag' or teleports. The default folders are what the client and server checks as you change sims.

/me looks at her Objects and Landmarks folders and starts to cry.

There there, don't cry. Create a folder called Stuff, and move all your items in the Objects folder there. And then create a folder called Landmarks to somewhere, and do the same for your Landmarks folder.

If you really want to feel OCD organized, create subfolders under the Stuff and Landmarks to Somewhere folders of Symbols, and A-Z, and put items in the folder that matches their first letter. Then you are well on to the path of OCD Organization. *grins*

These are fantastic ideas. Thanks!

I have my avatars organized by kingdom, phylum, class, order, suborder, superfamily, family, subfamily, genus, and species.

I had heard this before. I had also heard that the number of folders at the top level had an impact, so I try to keep that number down.
I have created my own set of folders, using special characters at the beginning of the name so they sort to the top and I use those almost exclusively. I even have my own "_objects" and "_landmarks" folders that I move things into from the system ones.

/me hates organized people

Can I ask how long you've been around in SL? I'm at about 28K after about 1.5 years but it's highly unorganized filled with duplicates of things, unfinished builds, outfits I've never worn etc. It stresses me out sometimes lol. I'm sure if I got my act together I could cull it quite significantly but unfortunately my inventory could probably be visually represented like this:



When I was making this poll I was somewhat unsure as to how best to utilize the maximum number of answers allowed when coming up with inventory ranges, not knowing what the median numbers were like.

For the > 45K folks, care to throw out an approximate number ... I'm curious to see who has the most ginormous inventory.