Would this be a good "quick fix" to shrink Database Load?

How about if, after an account is abandoned for...6 months (an example)...all of thier Inventory is deleted. Ya know...kinda like Yahoo mail does.

I remembered a Yahoo Mail address I used ta use years ago, and I even remembered the password. I logged in to see just how many 1,000s of messages I had in that Inbox.

NONE! They gave me a message saying that after a Yahoo Mail account is inactive for a certain amt of months, they delete EVERY mail message in the box because they need (?) the server space!

If ya wanna go back and use that account, you can re-activate it...but have to you START OVER, with no E-mail "Inventory" from the past.

Since all our Inventory is saved on the Database, am I wrong...or MIGHT this practice (if used) lead us into an...
Epic Golden Age Of Low Lag??
I read too many comics.

You'd have to have an LL programmer answer for sure, but since the files are jsut stored, not being accessed, I doubt they are eating bandwidth or CPU (Server) resources. Just simply another file of bytes stored. It may save them HD space, but I'm not sure if that's an issue.

~Jessy

That would have zero effect on performance/database load.

The difference here is that most people pay real money for what is in their inventory. They pay nothing for what collects in a Yahoo mailbox.

If I lose 6 months worth of e-mail spam and dated messages that are far too old to be relevant any more from a free e-mail account, it's no big deal.

If I am forced to take a hiatus on short notice, and return to find that all my no-transfer inventory, hundreds of US dollars worth of merchandise, got deleted by a plan like you propose? I'd be tearing someone's throat out.

Yes it is an issue. All of these items are stored in a database. If you eliminate stale records from the database (All that stuff from old accounts) then you don't have to search through those records to find the one that you want. Database size is a limiting factor in search speed, that's why they are using distributed databases (multiple databases, so you search through 5 smaller databases at the one time, instead of 1 big database.

Max

Yes, database size does limit search time...but generally a database can handle hundreds of millions of records with no problem. Getting rid of...lets see...my inventory is INSANELY cluttered and huge for me at the moment...and I've been a member for 2 years collecting stuff....so...hmmm...5,998 items...assuming all avatars have as much junk as I do (I probably need to cut that in half)...you'd need to probably get rid of over 1000 accounts to see any sort of SLIGHTLY noticable change. And when I say slight...I mean slight.

The detriment outweighs the benefit in this situation I feel.

*moves*

I think deleting it is a bit harsh, but there's nothing preventing the system taking 'dead' accounts and shifting all their stuff out of the database, compressing it and archiving it. When you re-activate your account it would all be restored again.

But as already pointed out; databases aren't overly affected by large amounts of data as they use special indexes which typically are log(n) efficiency or better, ie; as the data grows the amount of time it takes to find something levels off to the point that we could reach bazillions and it'll take about the same time as it does today. So the benefits of doing this aren't that great, nice idea though.
The real issue is the number of people all accessing stuff at once, and the system's capacity to cope with that.