What is simulator stored memory capacity?

[Sarah21 Baily]

I run a large venue on a mostly residential private-owned sim. As of the past two or three weeks, LL has been restarting our sim at random times, one of which was during an event we were hosting. I was given an explanation that described how a simulator may be prone to crashing when it approaches stored memory capacity, and that LL employees may restart sims that near this limit to mitigate crashes.

I was not given any explanation what this means, nor was I given any steps to take to eliminate this problem aside from "restart more frequently." I've not heard any other large venue owners complain about this problem, nor have I seen them require more than the single restart on Tuesdays to my knowledge.

Does anyone have any idea what about my specific sim may be causing this? What can I do to reduce the sim's stored memory usage? Our sim uses just under 600MB of total memory from what I can see in the About Region tab.

[Wulfie Reanimator]

Before LL moved to Amazon Web Services, multiple sims ran on the same server, so the server's memory usage was affected by more than just your sim.

Now that all sims are on AWS... it's a bit more of a mystery, unless somebody has some cool background infrastructure knowledge about AWS. Having less stuff (avatars, attachments, objects, physical objects, scripts, etc.) on your sim will reduce its memory usage, but I know that's not super useful advice.

[Qie Niangao]

52 minutes ago, Sarah21 Baily said:

 I've not heard any other large venue owners complain about this problem, nor have I seen them require more than the single restart on Tuesdays to my knowledge.

They do though. Some daily. I assume it matters or they wouldn't do it.

Apparently there are different categories of memory that can be exhausted. One that's frequently cited as a problem is much affected by terraforming, but that may have nothing to do with the current case. Also, regions that have a lot of come-and-go avatar traffic supposedly need to restart more often, so places like busy events, SL birthday sims, etc., tend to restart during off-peak hours. I don't know if this is really because avatar attachments leak memory, or they accumulate defunct network connections, or the sim just loses patience with us—who knows?—but it may be easier to schedule one's own restarts than to restart later, probably at peak, after stuff starts misbehaving.

Surely needing to restart, ever, is a sign of something sub-optimal in the simulator code. I wonder if anybody is working on it.

[elleevelyn]

1 hour ago, Qie Niangao said:

it may be easier to schedule one's own restarts than to restart later, probably at peak, after stuff starts misbehaving.

this

is better to restart you own region at times that best suits the region event schedule.  If you restart the region prior to say a 2 hour event and then a second restart is required within the next two hours then it narrows the cause window which can give both Linden and the region owner better information of what the issue is

[Alwin Alcott]

7 hours ago, Sarah21 Baily said:

I run a large venue on a mostly residential private-owned sim.

it's not the answer on your question, but the combination you have is rarely a very good one.
A huge venue on a residential region is for wise people a giant red flag for access and lag, ánd the issue you describe. Large venues are better of on their own regions, as others also said, you can restart it before the event, and have a fresh start.

Edited June 11, 2023 by Alwin Alcott