Subject: reaping inactives.

From: Judy Anderson <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 1 May 1992 15:01:24 -0700

We've been purging folks who have built "nothing interesting" after an
idle period of nine months.

"Nothing interesting" is currently defined as no verbs owned.  Most of
the stuff so junked has also had no description or very boring
descriptions (I spot check the stuff that's automatically discovered
by Dren's Salvage Factory, #546).

Note also that players who don't set descriptions on themselves and
don't own anything get reaped after 2 months whenever I run Nosredna's
find_bozos verb.  Now that we're on registration there are gonna be
lots fewer of these.

Note that Colin was incorrect when he said there were 46000 objects in
the DB.  Objnums aren't reused.

:proselytizes about objnum reuse

Reaped players and their objects don't get recycled, instead they get
stripped of their identity and go into #4455, the toad pile, to be
reused by #5803 descendents who have set their .recreate_enabled
property to 1...  (Say "help recycling" if you're a #5803 :-)

Judy Anderson yclept yduJ     [email-masked]    'yduJ' rhymes with 'fudge'
   Join the League for Programming Freedom, [email-masked]

---

From: [email-masked]
Date: Fri, 1 May 1992 15:26:40 -0700

This is my $.02.

>From the LambdaMOO times, dated Wed Apr 29, 1992:
> With the larger numbers of players we've been seeing, I'm sure many of you
> have noticed that the server has been hard-pressed to keep up with the demand.
> Please be courteous to the server, and avoid running CPU expensive commands
> frivolously.  Work by Haakon this summer should substantially improve the
> situation, but we have to pull together to survive until then.

For all it's amazing capability, MOO isn't as smart as it possibly could be
with memory management.  Given a better memory management scheme (say,
copy-on-write rather than copy-on-reference strings), who knows what size the
db would shrink to?

There are even other technical methods of solving the problems leading to
"$prog and all that."  One would be a disk based db.  Another (already
mentioned in this discussion) would be a distributed MOO.  These being the
best solutions I can see, and given that I am not willing to implement them,
the only reasonable thing I can do is "pull together" with everybody else with
the server performance as it is, which is not such an unreasonable thing in
the first place.  It may be unreasonable to others using lambda.xerox.com for
things other than MOO, but I can't say what goes on here.

> there are heaps and heaps of unfinished,
> irrelevant junk lying around.  I mean, really.  The db is >40 MB now.
> Over 40 million bytes of stuff, much of which is trash of one kind or
> another (tiny-scenery, clones of generic objects, etc).

The *theory* is that since the MOO is run on a machine with virtual memory,
all the unused stuff will get swapped out to disk.  In actuality, locality of
reference is probably poor in MOO (although I can't say that with any
authority), so the number of pages which tend to stick around in physical
memory (or cause trashing) is probably higher than would be desirable.  This
theory worked sort of OK for 40Mb TinyMUD databases, but I don't think the
philosophy still holds.  Again, this is a technical problem.

A database purge, restricted building, and even new player registration would
all help the performance of the server, but these solutions would also effect
the freedom which Lambda House provides.  I wouldn't be happy about losing my
programmer bit (even though I haven't programmed anything in *quite* a while),
and I'm sure that others would be burnt by the other measures.  Improvements
to MOO, on the other hand, would help performance of the server as well,
perhaps more than policy wrenches, and would not impair the wonderful MOO
freedom which is now available in LambdaMOO.

Nobody should take this as a plea from me for somebody else to improve MOO.  I
hate it when people ask me to fix things for them in this way, and I certainly
don't want to be a hypocrite.  My point is simply that the server performance
is tolerable for me, and I think efforts to improve MOO should be weighed in
along with the database reduction policies in this discussion.

BTW, I believe that inactive player purges have occurred in the past, and I
wouldn't be surprised at future ones.  I'm not arguing against this, just
pointing at some other stuff which I think should be brought into
consideration in this mail thread.

-K* (SHOT FROM GUNS)