Off-topic: Inventory Management Tools

Please excuse this off-topic post, but I thought that the folks in the Scripting Tips forum, would understand the implications of these questions better than in any other section of the forums.

While sorting through my Inventory after many months of neglect, I saw that I had multiple copies of copiable objects scattered throughout my Inventory. I would guess that this is the case for many residents. There is not, to my knowledge, and easy way to clean up (delete) all of these superfluous copies (leaving just a couple of copies).

My question is: what is the effect of having all these copies (for all residents) on the asset servers, the grid, speed, maintenance etc?

If the effect is detrimental in terms of speed, or other factors, why don't we have one or two simple Inventory cleanup tools at our disposal (this question is not rhetorical, I really do mean - why don't we?).

Are inventory tools to perform cleanup (removal of unncessary duplicates) something that could be programmed into a 3rd party viewer? (It seems to me that such a tool is merely an efficient search and sort function).

Is there a way to determine whether two objects in an inventory, with the same name, are actually two copies of the same object?

Rock

People who better understand the complexities of servers and the like may correct me here, but it is my understanding that individual inventories only affect the individual. In other words, it may take the server a long time to find everything in your inventory, but while it is doing so, it won't slow down the sim you are in. As I say, I could be wrong in this.

An intelligent inventory cleanup tool would indeed be nice, but, A) It is not LL's responsibility to deal with our individual inventories, and, perhaps more to the point, B) If they were to provide such a tool, they would inevitably be deluged with complaints that their inventory cleanup tool had deleted something important/expensive/irreplaceable from a customer's inventory. I certainly know I have temporarily lost things because I wasn't spelling their names the same as did the creators; how easy would it be, in such circumstances, to simply blame the inventory cleanup tool?

I used to be plagued with duplicates of copyable items, until I learned to delete them, instead of taking them back into inventory. As to determining whether all objects with the same name are truly the same objects, I'm afraid the only option I know of is to look at the properties of the item, or its UUID.

It would indeed be nice to simply be able to press a button to nuke all actual duplicates, but I'm afraid the only option we have right now is to keep on top of our inventories, and organize them whenever necessary. And actually, I kind of like it that way.

The objects in your inventory are just links to assets. If you copy an asset in your inventory or give a copy to someone else it doesn't create a new asset unless you actually modify it, all that happens is that a link to the shared asset is created.

It's like "copy on write" pages in shared memory.

First of all - an easy way to clean up is to use filters - filter out your landmarks and delete unwanted duplicates for example.

Second - use a few minutes a day to organize your inventory -ä this will not keep you from doing the first organiosational steps in a few days.

Third - Not all duplicates are unwanted - I have some copies of various things like clothing - for a quick change, landmarks in different categories .... So an automated tool would not satisfy my needs.

What I did some time ago was to analyse the inventory offline (it's part of your SL cache which is downloaded) with some kind of program to find duplicates and other things but didn't proceed with that (good housekeeping is much faster - lol)

Wol,
SL Guided Tours

inventory size (regardless of content) has been known to be a factor in foul ups, since your computer requests and stores the table of inventory references in the cache. faragmentation, sloppy addressing, and other things can corrupt this table, and a small enough cache will overwrite folders that aren't frequently used, causing them to be downloaded again the next time you try to view it...

so a smaller inventory is more friendly to you AND the asset server.

In general, yes. In this specific case, not for the asset server. Deleting identical copies of an asset from your inventory doesn't do anything to reduce load on the asset server. They only get pulled into your cache once.

Doesn't rezzing 6 copies of an object from inventory result in 6 UUIDs, and if you then take all of those back into Inventory doesn't that then result in 7 objects, each with a different UUID? Doesn't those copies then result in an extra 6 records in the Asset Server?

Rock

OK, if you copy an object in the sim you're not creating an identical copy in this case. Similarly if you upload a texture twice they're two assets. I generally end up with truly identical duplicates in my inventory from duplicate asset transfers (eg, purchases) or from saving outfits, or from copies made within the inventory for organizational reasons. Those kinds of duplicates are just references to the same assets.

The way I do it personally, after several years of trying different layouts, I created a new master folder. "[[Projects]]" under this folder, I have all my projects listened, one of these projects for example is 'Res' (Resources) where I collect valuable/useful/purposeful textures, sounds etc. Things that add value to a product, that kind of deal. For example under 'Res' I have 'Alpha' for various sets of alpha textures, like alpha gradients, all sorts of different patterns, but useful ones. For example I used these Alpha textures to create prim-shadows easily, fast and efficiently, without having to trot through various random folders to find a fitting alpha textures I was looking for.

Under [[Projects]] I also have 'aScripts' (Advanced Scripts (and also for alphabetical ordering purposes so it shows up top since I spend most of my time in it)). Under aScripts, it splits into different folders, for large complex scripts 'Library', say my pathfinding or physics function libraries, and smaller 'Random' assorted scripts, for example a script which spits out the local position and rotation and deletes the script automatically, and a third folder 'Useful' for short scripts that aren't exactly random, for example high performance optimizations or good high quality code blocks I can use for whatever purposes.

This is how I do it, all the other master folders you get with any account, 'Objects' 'Textures' etc is left as junk, temporary assets. In my 'Objects' folder, because it accumulates ridicolously fast and large into a cumbersome slow-loading folder, what I do is create special 'Overflow #' folders where I periodically drop EVERYTHING inside the master folder into these Overflow folders so that I don't lose old stuff that may be valuable, but I also speed up inventory loading since I don't need to load all objects again. Currently my 'Objects' master folder consists of 6 of these Overflow folders, each approximately contains 1,000 items, which otherwise would be a nightmare to load in one go.


I apply these rules strictly, I try to be highly restrictive on myself by what belongs into the [[Projects]] folders to keep a good division line between what is REALLY Useful/Purposeful and what is mere Garbage.

This is the best way to handle inventory organization IMHO from experience.