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What Causes Inventory Loss?


Prokofy Neva
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I'd really like to understand this.

I have a tenant with *40,000 lost items*. He's been up and down and around with the Lindens and with various expensive content makers like the breedables. The Lindens shrug and don't answer finally, and the breedables gang do a little bit but ultimately don't care because they're coining money anyway, I guess -- or they just can't get anywhere on this issue.

Obviously, nothing is really "lost" in SL, because all content exists on the asset server, for one, and for two, is often in the inventory of somebody who did NOT lose it, namely its creator.

So what's "lost" is the pointer from the asset server into your inventory. What makes this get lost? Is it about connection quality and lost packets? Is it about corrupt files? If one thing can be found, why not all?

I had an inventory that constantly varied from 25000 to 50,000 so I asked the Lindens finally to fix it. They had several goes while I got back to them multiple times. They removed some "corrupt files" and then just about every thing came back and stayed back. That's all it took. They "ran a script," they said.

But then, I went on a candidate viewer one day and my $3000 skin I was wearing got lost, never to return.

So what causes this? I don't have packet loss. Are there different reasons for it in different cases?

Does keeping things in folders help or hurt in terms of loss?

UPDATE: This is SEVERE inventory loss, not fixable by clearing cache (that's been done dozens of times), relogging and loading folders by the letters of the alphabet; logging on to the beta testing sim (an old wive's tale) and then relogging on to the main grid -- none of the tips and tricks work.

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If someone has a large inventory with too many items in a folder, only the first thousand or so will be displayed.  The cure is to move items into other folders or make subfolders to for them.

Creators are under no obligation to replace items that are lost.  For items are no copy/transfer, there is no way to prove to the creator that it just wasn't given away.  Most creators will not replace these items.  Some will replace copy/no transfer items.  You may have to present proof of purchase though such as the date you bought them or the transaction record.  If you don't have these, a creator may not be willing to go through their purchase records to find this information.

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This business of inventory loss is one which thousands of users have faced.  It needs must be due to communication errors within the Linden Asset-server cluster but there are many external factors that make such loss more likely.

Large inventories in and of themselves can cause issues simply due to the sheer volume of data that must be synchronised at every log in.  This appears to be more prevalent in Third-Party Viewers, though so far as I can see there is no good reason for this.

There has always been a limit to the number of items that can be accomodated in a single folder, and there is definite evidence that GIP (Good Inventory Practice) where a set of subfolders keeps items more handily organised both for the user and the asset-servers is advantageous.

It is always a surprise to me that a "large" inventory by LL terms is one over 10000 items.  Anyone who has more than 5 years in SL with an inventory of less than 25000 has my admiration and presumably either is not very sentimental about old items or is very good at boxing up or deleting items.

I do not think that much information is available about the load that large inventories place on the SL asset-servers and it might pay Linden Lab to make better provision on this topic in the Wiki and also on the SL blog.

In the limit all inventory is virtual - just a few lines of code, but to most of us it has great sentimental value and deserves better explanation than is currently made.

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Prokofy Neva wrote:Are there different reasons for it in different cases?

Yeah, and there are, like, geologic strata of different ways Inventory can go missing.

At any time in SL's history, though, there are at least two different kinds of "missing." First, the inventory may be perfectly intact on the servers, but viewers can't display it. That happens when there are more than a certain number (I thought it was 10,000, but maybe it's fewer) of entries in the same folder (maybe also at the top level). Second, the inventory can be corrupted or deleted server-side -- and there are many, many ways that has happened over the years, with different causes.

Sometimes the corruption can be fixed through extreme manual intervention -- basically, writing a special, one-time-use script to salvage some items for one particular account, after potentially many manhours invested in diagnosing that instance of corruption. 

I also remember times when a particular kind of corruption affected a number of users, so the support engineers could create a script to re-use for other accounts with those specific problems.

It all creates a common dilemma for software support: How much to spend on fixing a customer's broken stuff, or invest the same finite resources in preventing future breakage. Either way, some customer suffers.

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I totally disagree regarding breedables.

They are essentially "licensed" to you because you have to keep feeding them or they die, so their creators keep selling you food and various accessories like ways to breed them, etc.

They are all maintained on servers outside of SL, so it should NOT be a problem for a creator merely to replace this expensive item that is NOT on transfer, that is NOT the issue.

You're haranguing me about transfer items but the lion's share of things lost are NOT transferable, that's the point.

Many merchants are better than you, in fact, and find that being able to RE-DELIVER is in fact a valuable feature. Nowadays with the monopolist Casper, you can go and see an entire page of your items purchased from various stores but all with this vendor, and re-deliver anything lost. It truly is no skin off theirs.

As for your fussing about proof of purchase, with the 32-day SL records that is an annoyance. But again, we're talking about people with SERVERS OUTSIDE OF SL for whom it is a trivial matter to type in a user name and find out the product and simply make one click to restore it.

I'm also not getting any answers to my question here about what the technical reasons are for inventory loss on the server side.

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Prokofy Neva wrote:

I'm not getting why there are so many man hours here.

If you send the Lindens the exact name of an object, why can't they type it in on the asset server and shoot it to your inventory? 

Inventory contains vast numbers of individual unique instances, not only pointers to assets common across instances. If you wear an item and modify it, for example, and take it into inventory, the next time your rez it out it will have those modifications; it's those specific instances that makes up Inventory.

That's why Inventory storage is so very huge and grows so fast, but mere scale doesn't mean retrieval has to be difficult. The problem is that "lost inventory" is always about something that has gone wrong in storage or (usually) retrieval, such that the normal process just doesn't work anymore. Whatever prevents the account from getting its own inventory item is going to prevent a Linden from getting that item, too, until they solve and workaround that problem for that specific instance of failure. (And if we're all very lucky, maybe also figure out the root cause of that particular failure and fix it so it doesn't happen again.)

 

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Qie, once again, the question is simple: *why can't the Lindens just type in the name of the object you claimed and send it to you from the asset sever????*

You didn't answer it because the answer must be "because they can't prove you own that item."

Of course they can, however, as all they have to do is look up your transaction records *for more than 32 days* and see when you bought or were given the item in question -- a simple search with a name.

Now, why can't they do that? 

1. Because they don't have records beyond 32 days -- although they should, given how much they lose things.

2. Because they're  not willing to do even this, if they have the record, type the name of the object twice?

See, THOSE are the answers. Not the answers you gave which are irrelevant.

Sure it's "nice to have" if they can figure out the WHY of it. But we need customer service, not a science project.

Therefore the Lindens either have to keep records going back at least 90 days and tell people claims can be made for items purchased or received 90 days (ideally, longer).\

OR -- if this is the issue -- overcome their unwillingness

What is the downside to keeping records 90 days? I don't see it. Keeping records 90 days is just like keeping them 32 days really -- these are web site records of the sort all companies have and they aren't huge weights on the server surely.

How can something go wrong for *40,000 records*. Those complex issues of modifications blah blah might explain one or ten or 100 but *40,000*? That's something completely different

Given that in my case, the Lindens fixed a non-loading inventory that never loaded more than 20,000 and refused to let you even rez anything searched with by name -- you'd have to first erase that name, then rez it -- and did this by removing a few corrupt items, putting it back to 50,000 -- without any complaints of heavy lifting or huge amounts of time -- I have to assume this is not the big deal you're describing. I want to understand precisely the mechanism for how 40,000 items go missing.

In my case, it's as you say, they didn't load/display (and no, they weren't all "in one folder" -- who does that???). The corrupted items prevented this, they removed them. What OTHER reasons would there be for this phenomenon?

 

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Prokofy Neva wrote:

Qie, once again, the question is simple: *why can't the Lindens just type in the name of the object you claimed and send it to you from the asset sever????*

You didn't answer it because the answer must be "because they can't prove you own that item."

Of course they can, however, as all they have to do is look up your transaction records *for more than 32 days* and see when you bought or were given the item in question -- a simple search with a name.

Now, why can't they do that? 

1. Because they don't have records beyond 32 days -- although they should, given how much they lose things.

2. Because they're  not willing to do even this, if they have the record, type the name of the object twice?

See, THOSE are the answers. Not the answers you gave which are irrelevant.

Listen, if you want to make a political statement, knock yourself out. Your statements, however, do not accurately answer the question you posed. Rather, they answer some different question about how Lindens might replace lost items with fresh, uncustomized copies. That might placate some SL consumers, and you could have asked that question, but that wasn't the question you asked.

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