[Opensim-dev] oddities with asset storage

[Melanie]

All you described is design behavior.


Prim items in world are not assets. They are stored exclusively in
the prims tables of the region.

Once taken, they become an asset. The name is totally meaningless,
it reflects whatever was the name at creation. Nothing else. It
never changes from there on.

On deleting the inventory item, assets remain. There is no easy or
practicable way to conclusively say that an asset is trash, because
we don't know.

In your test case, your (human) mind could know this for a fact,
however, the silicon mind of the asset server can't.

This is because you may have given the object to another user, or
put a copy into a prim.

These copies would refer to the same asset, that is what "implictily
shared" means.

So, any asset may, at any time, have any number of links to it, even
zero.

Like a website, you don't know who linked to it. If you remove it,
you leave dead links. Assets are the same. Except, you get "Asset
missing from database".

So, assetas are NOT 1-to-1 with inventory items, and they _never_
get deleted.

They have to be reaped, and there is a big discussion over how to
best do that, running right now.

Melanie


Dirk Krause wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I did a little test with a fresh OpenSim installation (yes, thanks for
> the installer!),
> to get a grip on what I learned from Melanie yesterday.
> 
> I wrote a little python script to help me monitor these tables:
>   inventoryStore/inventoryItems
>   assetStorage/assets
> http://pastebin.com/mc9e6574 , be warned: ugly code.
> 
> I started OpenSim and logged in a 'Test User' with the SL viewer.
> 
> (Just to mention it - first time log in in as test users creates
> 4 'blank' entries in assets.)
> 
> The inventoryItems table was initially empty.
> 
> Now I rezzed a cube and renamed it to 'p1'.
> inventoryStore/inventoryItems was still empty.
> To my surprise no new entry shows up in assetStorage/assets.
> 
> Picking up the cube ('take') created an entry named 'p1' in the
> inventory and in the asset table.
> 
> Now I renamed the cube in Test Users inventory to 'p2'.
> The name in inventoryStore/inventoryItems changes to 'p2'.
> The entry in assetStorage/assets stays 'p1'. As mentioned on the list
> before,
> the asset name is useless, since the user only sees the name in the
> inventory.
> 
> Now I deleted 'p2' in my inventory - 'p2's parentfolderID changes to
> 'Trash'.
> Now I emptied the trash - the inventory table is empty again, which is
> fine,
> but here's the big one:
>    the assetStorage/assets still holds the reference to 'p1'.
> 
> Just to make sure I shut down the simulator and opened it again, and it
> was still there.
> 
> Now, doesn't that mean, that the database increases over time with no
> hope to find
> these assets that actually should be gone? or is there some magic
> purging that happens,
> and that I missed?
> 
> This would mean that any grid runs into a severe problem over time.
> 
> Best,
>   Dirk/Bart
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