[Updated] Satyr Farm Animals

Posted By: Vincent Sylvester
Posted On: 2021-12-29 12:23 AM

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We regularly checkup on things to see if everything surrounding the grid is still doing it's job have found the assets database to show some performance reduction compared to last time it was checked. Sure enough on closer look we found literal millions of entries all regarding Notecards created by some form of animals related to satyr animal system. It seems the scripts inside these make use of Notecards to save certain data and overwrite this quite often resulting in Notecards being created at an alarming rate.

As assets are somewhat static each new Notecard constitutes a new asset effectively making the previous one orphaned. We can only classify this as spam and poor coding on the part of the creators of these animals. We have elected to remove all entries from our assets database, which might result in some of these animals not working anymore now, but in the interest of keeping the grid performance at acceptable levels it is either that or running extensive checks across the entire grid to find orphaned asset entries, which is something that equally greatly impacts grid performance negatively.

For anyone impacted by this please make sure to let the creators of these animals know to hopefully less egregious scripts in future. We will continue to keep an eye on what these scripts create on our end and may elect to entirely remove the offending scripts as well as a last resort. If you have doubt over whether one of your animals is affected you can send a copy to grid staff to have it looked at, usually offending systems include a Notecard named "an_statusNC" or similar.

Update:

We have processes millions, 30+ million in fact, of entries from SF animal Notecards and have deleted the entries and the 85GB of accompanying data from our asset server. This is by far the largest chunk of data caused by a single set of scripts. We will be keeping an eye on whether any of this data returns. Seeing as this is part of a larger set of scripts we will be looking into satyr scripts as a whole and whether they constitute a spam risk for the grid. Safe to say this level of script coding has no place on any grid or OpenSim in general. This is especially egregious given the data inside these Notecards was being updated so frequently and in terms of size did not exceed the 255 character limit of Primitive descriptions, which are generally a much better place to store specific data as each new Notecard generates a new asset. As we do not wish to outright banish a system from the grid, if you would like to continue using affect objects or are worried they might be affected feel free to contact grid administration to have them looked at.