[sldev] GC and asset references (was Sims and Script Security)

Sean Lynch sean at lindenlab.com
Mon May 19 10:14:35 PDT 2008


We will catch asset IDs in notecards, but if you keep asset IDs solely
outside of SL that are not referenced by anything in-world or in your
inventory, those assets may get deleted. Note that they just have to be
*referenced*, i.e. the asset ID must appear somewhere that we look for it
(which is hopefully anywhere that you can get to it where it's on our
storage). The assets don't actually have to get used in any way.

It's likely that we will only delete unreferenced assets if they also
haven't been recently used, though what recently used means will need to be
defined. Right now there is a process that watches the asset server HTTP
logs and moves accessed assets into a "recently used" pile, which is turned
over periodically, eventually resulting in unused (not necessarily
unreferenced) assets getting put into slower, cheaper storage (right now
just zip files on the asset servers, which take up less space due to the
Isilons' large block size.) Obviously we need to be careful of the
possibility of this covering up problems with GC; anything GC thinks we
should delete that is only saved because it was recently accessed was either
recently made unreferenced, a bug, or an asset with only offworld
references. We need to be concerned about the latter two.

On Mon, May 19, 2008 at 7:17 AM, Matthew Dowd <matthew.dowd at hotmail.co.uk>
wrote:

> Suppose the asset ids are being read from a notecard, or an offworld
> database via http?
>
> (this might be hypothetical, in that the assets concerned would most likely
> still be referenced from someone's inventory - unless perhaps the original
> creator's account has been deleted?)
>
> Matthew
>
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> > From: q at lindenlab.com
> > To: blindwanderer at gmail.com
> > Subject: Re: [sldev] Sims and Script Security
> > Date: Mon, 19 May 2008 10:07:32 -0400
> > CC: sldev at lists.secondlife.com
>
> >
> > This makes me want to note that our asset garbage collection system
> > attempts to identify references to asset IDs all throughout our
> > databases. If the only reference to an asset is within a script, and
> > the script is obfuscated so that the asset ID no longer looks like an
> > asset ID (by, say, encrypting it), the asset will eventually get
> > garbage collected.
> >
> > So please don't do that.
> >
> > Q
> >
> > On May 19, 2008, at 9:23 AM, Strife Onizuka wrote:
> >
> > > Doesn't matter if you send the script text, you can almost always
> > > decompile the bytecode (there is some really devious stuff you can do
> > > in LSO that makes automated decompilation essentially impossible and
> > > manual decompilation a very arduous task.
> > >
> > > Strife Onizuka
> > >
> > > On Mon, May 19, 2008 at 12:41 AM, Darien Caldwell
> > > <darien_caldwell at comcast.net> wrote:
> > >> Not long ago there was talk about how IBM has private sims behind a
> > >> firewall. (
> http://www.virtualworldsnews.com/2008/04/ibm-takes-secon.html
> > >> )
> > >> I was wanting to know, if they take a scripted item into this
> > >> private space,
> > >> does that give them any possible way to view the source code of
> > >> scripts for
> > >> said objects? or are only the compiled bytecodes sent to the sim?
> > >> Did LL
> > >> make place any restrictions on what IBM can do with user content
> > >> once it is
> > >> taken into this area, or should creators start issuing EULAs if
> > >> they don't
> > >> want their items brought into this potentially unregulated space?
> > >>
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