[MUD-Dev] The grass is always greener in the other field

[Koster]

> -----Original Message-----
From: Cynbe ru Taren [mailto:cynbe at muq.org]
Sent: Thursday, December 16, 1999 4:45 PM
To: mud-

dev at kanga.nu
Subject: Re: [MUD-Dev] The grass is always greener in the other field 




> "Bruce Mitchener, Jr." <bruce at puremagic.com> wrote:



> Net result should be that accumulated unused objects just cost you a

> fixed amount of disk space: They don't show up in ram and they don't

> show up repeatedly in your backups, except to increase compute time

> for them in linear fashion.  On that basis, an UOL scale operation

> should be able to afford gigabytes of background junk without strain,

> and terabytes without much problem.  No?



On disk, sure, you can afford a ton. Until the time when you have to read
the whole shebang into memory (a reboot for example) or search through it.
:) Then it gets cumbersome to have so much data. Again, of course you can
throw money/disk space/memory at the problem. Nonetheless, it behooves the
designers of the software to work to minimize this at all times because it's
simply not cost-efficient to do otherwise.



The memory footprint is directly affected by what you want to DO with said
objects. You running decay timers on them? Script event handling? Then you
gotta have at least some sort of pointer to the data in memory. Which means
ever-larger hash tables, which can, for example, slow down decay rates or
(if you have a bad event handler) affect game performance.



-Raph



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