[Opensim-dev] AssetServer Observations and Suggestions

[Mike Mazur]

Hi,

On Sun, 8 Feb 2009 10:13:45 -0800 (PST)
Charles Krinke <cfk at pacbell.net> wrote:

> We have been studying the assets table on OSGrid as it heads toward
> the "disk full" stage and I have a couple of observations and am
> heading towards a suggestion. Maybe this is already accounted for in
> the "Cable Beach" project, at which point, this will only indicate
> that I did not read all the exchanges carefully enough.
> 
> It appears to me that we are storing on the MySQL data store at the
> assetServer on a grid every edit of every script, terrainImage and
> clothingItem amongst other things. So, my first observation is that
> we appear to be storing all the older, obsolete items that can no
> longer be accessed.

This ever-expanding asset database is a consequence of how assets are
handled by SL, the SL viewer and, since OpenSim was first developed
against the SL viewer, by OpenSim as well. The premise is that no asset
is mutable, because any asset may be referenced by its UUID. The
reference may exist in a script or on the back of a napkin. There are
more details (the way I understand them) in a previous email[1] I sent
to the list.

Cable Beach will not solve this problem.

> Now, to the beginnings of a suggestion. It seems to me that each
> avatar will have a "home" region. And that perhaps that is the place
> to store the items in an avatars inventory. Things like scripts,
> notecards, textures and the like. 

I'm not sure this is the right way forward. It requires that the user's
home region is up anytime they wish to use their avatar and access
their inventory. The user's home region becomes a single point of
failure.

> At that point, the assetServer on a grid could be used to store only
> pointers (or URL's) to each avatars inventory on his or her home
> region.

This is a good start, except instead of pointing to the user's home
region, it could point to the user's own asset server. The asset server
could be provided by a grid (OSGrid), their own asset server (a Cable
Beach instance, perhaps), or some other third party that may provide
asset storage/access in the future (SL, Yahoo!, Google, AOL, etc).

Thanks,
Mike


[1]
https://lists.berlios.de/pipermail/opensim-dev/2008-December/004053.html