[sldev] Script/Parcel/Memory Limits

[Marine Kelley]

Although all neat and certainly very clever, would this kind of  
solution still satisfy my primary need as a scripter ?I.e. being  
CERTAIN that my scripts will NEVER crash because of memory shortage  
due to reasons that are out of my control ? I could write the best  
script in the world that takes a constant amount of memory, it would  
still crash eventually if this amount suddenly became higher than the  
limit, if this limit moves down when the sim becomes busier.

The script could freeze, slow down, we could have functions and events  
to stay aware of how many bytes we have left, but to me the core issue  
is that scripts which run out of memory simply endure an unrecoverable  
crash. This basic behavior is very wrong in the first place and must  
be revised.

Yes I do know this is asking a lot. I do not even expect this to  
change any time soon, but in the meantime PLEASE don't add one more  
level of uncertainty when it comes to scripting. I want to know how  
many bytes I have left, and I want total control over what consumes  
them.

Leave the limits fixed !

Marine


On 18 déc. 2009, at 13:32, Carlo Wood <carlo at alinoe.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Dec 17, 2009 at 07:17:03AM -0500, Qie Niangao wrote:
>> I sense an opportunity for some non-trivial mathematics to be applied
>> to optimally setting these limits.
>>
>> The obviously, horribly wrong approach would be to set a ceiling for
>> all script memory use in a region and apportion that to parcel and
>> avatar allotments such that no over-allocation could ever occur.   
>> This
>> would create much lower limits than required for sub-ceiling
>> operations almost all the time.
>
> THANK YOU!!!
> Finally someone else that understands this :)
>
> I hope that you, and everyone else that understands this, will go
> the Babbage office hours to bring this under her attention again
> and again; until he understands that the easy road is not the right
> one, and some more difficult approach HAS to be taken.
>
>> Rather, the total amount of script memory that the limits permit may
>> be two or five or ten times that ceiling and still only encounter the
>> ceiling once every millenium or century or decade--all depending on
>> the distribution of transient demand for the capacity being limited.
>> So a Poisson or Erlang or some such distribution is relevant here.
>
> Exactly. The servers will simply only use a FRACTION of their
> resources on average. A huge waste of resources that we, the  
> residents,
> will have to pay for, literally.
>
>> What's interesting is that there are (at least) two identifiable
>> distributions: scripts in avatar attachments, and in parcel-resident
>> objects.  The former is much, much more transient, of course.  It all
>> feels a bit like engineering fibre capacity to optimally handle
>> predicted demand for different telecom applications.
>>
>> Ignoring that new scripting functions may systematically change these
>> demand distributions, this seems an interesting problem for somebody
>> with the right background (not me!).
>>
>> Even if solving the optimization problem is judged overkill, I wanted
>> to at least prevent that "obviously, horribly wrong approach."
>
> The problem however is not technical (point out the flaw and people
> start working on it), it is political. Before Babbage is going to
> listen to this you'll need a LOT of lobbying-- no matter how utterly
> true it is.
>
> -- 
> Carlo Wood <carlo at alinoe.com>
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