[DGD]statedumping

[Kris Van Hees]

On Wed, May 10, 2000 at 04:20:03PM -0400, Stephen Schmidt wrote:
> Ah, a slightly different question then: What does DGD do if the
> swap file exceeds the maximum size? I don't know. I imagine it
> does something that raises a problem for true perpetuality, but
> what is it?

Last I checked, it called fatal() which effectively terminates the driver
process.

> > Good point altogether.  I was of course making the assumption that the
> > mudlib itself has been written in a decent way to not leave garbage around.
> 
> In principle, of course, that should be true; in practice, proving
> that any mudlib complex enough to be interesting actually satisfied
> that assumption is non-trivial. I don't know for sure but I would
> imagine the large majority of publically available mudlibs probably
> have at least some small leaks in them. If you're going to reboot
> the mud every so often anyway, then they wouldn't be noticed; but
> if you went to true perpetuality they'd eventually rear their
> heads and bite.

I'd say that the vast majority of the available mudlibs have enormous object
leaks in them.  It is one of the stronger reasons why I am an advocate for
actually doing development on a test version of the actual mud, and to not
move code to the production version until after an proper testing has taken
place.  That, together with a fairly sound system to limit what code can be
retained forever as objects (e.g. rooms, until they are explicitly removed)
tends to do the trick.  It's pretty tough though, and probably not likely to
be seen implemented properly except on experimental (small) mudlibs and maybe
commercial projects.

	Kris

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