[DGD]statedumping

[Stephen Schmidt]

On Wed, 10 May 2000, Risto Karjalainen wrote:
>> Isn't those reboots needed to clear the computer's memory of the
>> [stuff] that the mud-driver has created there?

On Wed, 10 May 2000, Kris Van Hees wrote:
> As objects are swapped out, the memory space they took up is released
> to the driver again.... 
> So in the end, the swapping mechanism cleans up memory junk (such as circular
> referencing data structures that cannot be cleaned up through reference
> counting) and the state dump just makes it so that the object world is saved
> in a persistent state, to be loaded again after a server reboot.
 
This assumes that the mudlib itself does good housecleaning,
and that objects in the mudlib that have outlived their usefulness
will eventually get taken out of the game world. That might not
be true. Swapping helps, but doesn't solve the problem in a truly
permanent way, since if you -never- restart the mud, and you have
objects that never get cast loose from the game world, eventually
(-very- eventually perhaps) the swap file will fill the hard disk.
Probably not a serious problem, but as a general principle, to
keep a mud running perpetually, one has to make sure that the
equivalent of clean_up() that gets rid of unneeded objects 
doesn't have a leak in it. This isn't what the original poster
asked about, but it is sufficiently closely related that it
seems worth mentioning.

Steve



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