[Opensim-dev] Feature Request: Smart Regions - Idle Region Timeouts and "On The Fly" loading/unloading of inactive idle regions

[Karen Palen]

Maybe I am being overly simplistic here, but it seems to me that this thread
is straying far afield from the original proposal!

To me this seems to be analogous to what is done with just about every
movement simulator (e.g. flight simulator) that I have seen - the only areas
that are "active" are the ones which have some sort of occupancy (carbon
based or silicon based).

The vast majority of regions, both in a virtual world and in a movement
simulator are simply irrelevant since no one is monitoring them! I pass
lightly over the philosophical question of a "tree falling in the woods"
since this is merely an analog of the real world not the real thing :-)

My model here is the early versions of the MS Flight Simulator in which a
"default" and very crude map of the world was used having "green" squares
for land and "blue" squares for sea areas. If there exists a defined region
for one of the squares then it is displayed, otherwose only the default
square is used. THis woudl seem to work for both the global map function as
well as for teleports.

Clearly there are huge issues involved with accurately simulating and
generating "empty" regions, however this seems to be considerably beyond the
scope of the original proposal!

Surely for the near term, allowing some sort of "timeout" coupled with some
efficient means of activating any region which could affect a user is not a
huge research project. As far as I can see this is essentially the concept
of "virtualization" in a new wrapper!

The issues to me would seem to be mostly ones of "how efficient" and "how
relevant for activation".

Provided those two issues have reasonable answers it would seem to be
possible to "fly", "walk" or "sail" over a truly global grid with very
little hardware resources. Added resources would depend entirely on how many
users are actually interested in different regions.

Servicing of a region with multiple occupants would seem to be essentially
unchanged from th epresent model.

Am I totally missing something obvious here?

Karen


On Tue, Jul 6, 2010 at 6:54 PM, Mark Malewski <mark.malewski at gmail.com>wrote
>
>
> Running hundreds (or thousands) of IDLE regions require too many system
> resources (RAM, CPU cycles, etc.)
>
> I believe that the basic server core (OpenSim) should eventually be
> modified so that ALL regions should have a configurable "timeout" option
> field (in the regions.ini file).
>
> http://opensimulator.org/wiki/Configuring_Regions
>
> That way an idle "region timeout" can be set (on a region per region
> basis), and this would allow the OpenSim server to shut down idle regions
> (based on the "idle timeout" configured in the regions.ini file).
>
> So if a region were completely empty for a particular number of minutes
> (let's say a region were empty and idle for 5 minutes, then the idle region
> could be shut down automatically after the set "idle timeout" period for
> that particular region).
>
>
>
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