[Opensim-dev] AssetServer Observations and Suggestions

[Melanie]

Hi,

Charles Krinke wrote:
> Each terrain edit appears to create a new "terrainImage" entry 
> in the assets table and each time that happens, all previous terrain 
> images become unlinked, unusable and unnecessary. 

As I mentioned in a separate post, I have a map that uses these 
terrain images. Removing them would render the map unusable. I 
believe thet region servers have better things to do than server 
thousands of requests for their terrain image and that that sort of 
HTTP traffic is not what a region server should have to endure, it 
should serve a region, not be a webserver.
Therefore, a centralized store of terrain images is a good thing to 
have. However, I do agree that the previous one can be deleted, if a 
way can be found to do so safely.
Terrain images have the "Temporary" flag set, so should be safe to 
delete when they are 1 day old and not referenced from the Regions 
table.

> A similar thing happens with scripts, notecards, and clothes. 
> Prims themselves are stored in the regions datastore, so they 
> dont apply to this discussion.

These items are implicitly shared, therefore you can't just delete 
the old version; someone may hold an inventory item with a link to it.
That is the inherent dilemma with the LL way of asset handling. 
There are two basic approaches: A one to one asset<->inventory 
mapping with mutable assets; this will create a new copy of each 
asset for each time it is used of referenced in a user;s inventory, 
or the current, read-only, implicitly shared asset architecture. The 
current viewer doesn't support mutable assets, so that is not a real 
option at the moment.

Avoiding asset proliferation is not really possible at this time, so 
I believe that pruning assets is the avanue that has more options 
and that should be investigated.

Melanie