[sldev] Script/Parcel/Memory Limits - Memory Limit Configuration

[Kelly Linden]

Ooooh! I love the completely ridiculous analogy game!  Can I play?

Carlo manages an apartment complex.  After renting apartments for years out
to just single families he realizes that significant portions of his
building are empty and not being used for significant periods of the day.
 He can make more money by renting to more people if he can fill up that
space.  Given holidays, work, school, errands, entertainment etc each family
is probably only in their space for 50% of the time.  Heck if you consider
it on a per room basis and take into account sleeping time, there is even
more unused space!  So he rents each apartment out to 3 families, which
should totally be fine and he continues to charge and allocate the space as
if each family had their own apartment.  After all there are enough rooms
for everyone, for the portion of the time they are probably home.

Of *course* this is ridiculous, and of *course* the swimming pool example is
ridiculous and of *course* the SL resource problem doesn't directly map to
either. Though I think it may be closer to the apartment case than the
swimming pool example.  When you rent or lease land you aren't buying
entrance to a theme park or movie or swimming pool.  You are buying space to
live or work or whatever.  You want to know that your TV will work whenever
you want to use it and that your bed will be available to you.  The pool
owner wants to know that his electricity and pool filtering and water supply
aren't tied to factors he can't control, and he wants to know that he can
support 30 swimmers whether the club across the street is open or not.

However as I have said before I don't think strict allocation of available
resources make sense either, because SL isn't an apartment building or a
swimming pool.  In that very post you replied to I talked about overselling
and managing the hosts regions run on to keep regions happy.  This I think
is a reasonable compromise that allows for a simple to understand system
that is easy to work with and plan with but doesn't overly sacrifice
available resources.

 - Kelly

On Fri, Dec 18, 2009 at 3:55 PM, Carlo Wood <carlo at alinoe.com> wrote:

> On Fri, Dec 18, 2009 at 10:13:36AM -0800, Kelly Linden wrote:
> > I place a high value on simplicity.  I want to trivially understand where
> I am,
> > how much headroom I have, how close I am to what limits there are.  I
> don't
>
> The swimming pool
> -----------------
>
> Once upon a time there was a swimming pool that costed $100 per day
> to run.  Every day 100 people came to swim. Of course, they didn't
> come all at the same time, thank God no! Imagine that... you'd only
> have 1/100th of the water to swim in! No, sometimes there were
> a little more and sometimes there were a little less people.
> Not everyone stayed 24 hours per day, after all.
>
> One day, one of the customers complained to the management of
> the swimming pool, saying "Last Wednesday I could swim in my
> own lane, but today it's way too crowded to swim! I wish I could
> see how many people are inside before I pay the entrance fee!"
> and he looked really mad.
>
> Now the manager, Mr.Kelly, was a smart man and he found quickly
> a solution that everyone would understand, and after which everyone
> would have precisely the same area to swim in no matter when they
> would come! He said: Although there come 100 people every day,
> I think that at the most busy moments of the say I've ever
> only seen 30 at the same time. That number might be changed a bit,
> but lets say that's the maximum. Then we can garantee that you
> have the same area to swim in at every moment by giving you
> 1/30 of the swimming pool. From now on, even if the pool is
> EMPTY... or when there are only 3 people like on Sunday mornings,
> you are not allowed to use more than 1/30 of the swimming pool
> area. This way we have solved the problem of those griefer
> school kids too that come here with 100 kids at once, just to
> obstruct and annoy the other swimmers: as soon as there are
> really 30 people inside, we close the doors :).
>
> And so, everyone was happy-- because now they knew that whenever
> they came, they would have precisely 1/30 of the swimming pool...
> Well, except for about 90% of the customers, who were used to
> having MUCH more space normally, but they were quickly convinced
> that they only PAID for 1/30 (after all the math was such that
> nobody could argue here). And yeah, the entrence price remained
> the same too. One year later the swimming pool was broke.
>
> The End
>
> --
> Carlo Wood <carlo at alinoe.com>
>
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