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Does the size of Chat History files affect anything?
SuezanneC Baskerville
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Join date: 22 Dec 2003
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09-12-2009 20:06
Do big chat history files slow SL down any?
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Viktoria Dovgal
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Join date: 29 Jul 2007
Posts: 3,593
09-12-2009 20:42
Chat logging is a pig, but the file size shouldn't make a huge difference unless the OS is doing something particularly wacky. All the work is done in newview/lllogchat.cpp, it's pretty vanilla stdio stuff.

It's a little piggy because the log file for chat or IM is f open()'d in append mode, the line written, and the file closed separately for every single line written :p To get the history when a new window opens, it's using an fseek from the end.
Nika Talaj
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Join date: 2 Jan 2007
Posts: 5,449
09-12-2009 21:50
From: Viktoria Dovgal
It's a little piggy because the log file for chat or IM is f open()'d in append mode, the line written, and the file closed separately for every single line written :p
:eek:
Kidd Krasner
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Join date: 1 Jan 2007
Posts: 1,938
09-13-2009 08:26
From: Viktoria Dovgal
Chat logging is a pig, but the file size shouldn't make a huge difference unless the OS is doing something particularly wacky. All the work is done in newview/lllogchat.cpp, it's pretty vanilla stdio stuff.

It's a little piggy because the log file for chat or IM is f open()'d in append mode, the line written, and the file closed separately for every single line written :p To get the history when a new window opens, it's using an fseek from the end.

Assuming it's using a standard C library layered on top of MS Windows (as opposed to using MS OS calls directly), I wish I could remember how NTFS and/or FAT performance compares to Linux, etc. on those calls. There may be no difference, it may even be faster on NTFS/FAT, I just don't know the state of the world these days.

Anyone else able to comment?
Viktoria Dovgal
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Join date: 29 Jul 2007
Posts: 3,593
09-13-2009 10:03
No special casing for Windows in terms of native stuff, except that it uses _wfopen instead of fopen.
DanielRavenNest Noe
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Join date: 26 Oct 2006
Posts: 1,076
09-13-2009 10:32
So if your chat.txt file is 120MB like mine, any point in splitting off the old stuff to a backup file?
LittleMe Jewell
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Join date: 8 Oct 2007
Posts: 11,319
09-13-2009 10:35
From: DanielRavenNest Noe
So if your chat.txt file is 120MB like mine, any point in splitting off the old stuff to a backup file?
Back when I saved my logs, I would routinely split my files off, dating the backups. This was really more for my own benefit in not having to look thru such a long log if I was looking for something.
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Katheryne Helendale
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Join date: 5 Jun 2008
Posts: 2,187
09-13-2009 11:43
From: Kidd Krasner
Assuming it's using a standard C library layered on top of MS Windows (as opposed to using MS OS calls directly), I wish I could remember how NTFS and/or FAT performance compares to Linux, etc. on those calls. There may be no difference, it may even be faster on NTFS/FAT, I just don't know the state of the world these days.

Anyone else able to comment?
Linux is a server OS by nature. Linux logs *everything*, and does so by appending existing log files. It is something Linux is very good at, as you don't even notice it happening except for the occasional brief flicker of the hard drive light. I don't know if it is the kernel itself that makes append-logging so efficient, or if it has to do with the EXT filesystem.

FWIW, I have over 100MB of chat logs dating back from late last year, and notice absolutely no degradation of performance because of them.
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Viktoria Dovgal
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Join date: 29 Jul 2007
Posts: 3,593
09-13-2009 12:19
A typical syslogd will leave the files open, and sequential is easy. The constant opening and closing in SL is a potential bottleneck. That kind of thing used to be ouchful, caches should have taken away most of the pain on just about any OS by now. It can still hurt if the storage is slow because you aren't getting any buffering inside the application.
Argent Stonecutter
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Join date: 20 Sep 2005
Posts: 20,263
09-13-2009 12:33
In UNIX, if you open a file in append mode, there's an implicit seek to the end before every write, regardless of where the seek offset is before then. This is oldschool stuff from the '70s.
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