Does anyone know if Links affect performance?

[Lindal Kidd]

Since I discovered Outfits, my inventory has been expanding exponentially.  But it's not that I'm adding so many new items, the problem is all those links, links, links!

With every Outfit, there are certain things that I almost always wear, and with each new Outfit, a new set of Links are created to these items.

Links, of course, are counted in the total number of items in the inventory.

Now, I know that a large inventory affects performance.  It can slow log ins and log outs, and slow down teleports.  But here's my question:  Does the same thing happen, if the large inventory is the result of a large number of Links, rather than actual items?

Inquiring Fashionistas want to know!

[Madelaine McMasters]

I know nothing about inventory, but that won't stop me from imagining. Every item in your inventory is already just a link. The actual items are on the asset servers and inventory contains links (UUIDs) to those things. This allows the asset servers to save only one texture for an object that may be owned by a million residents. The SL server farm may distribute copies of that texture to speed up access, but that's invisible to the upper floors of the SL architecture.

As a result of storing nothing but UUID links in them, inventory cache files are tiny. Maddy's inventory cache file, for the 10K items she's hoarded, is 144KBytes. Snugs' inventory cache file, with 3K items (mostly library) is 43KBytes. Although these are tiny by almost any metric, SL stores them as gzip compressed files. They're unzipped on launch and rezipped on quit, so the pack/unpack overhead is incurred only once per session and the inventory list is kept in RAM while you're logged-in.

Outfit links should look and behave just like regular inventory line items. They may say (link) in our view, but under the hood they're probably almost indistinguishable from a regular line of inventory.

So, if a large inventory messes things up, I don't imagine it makes any difference whether it got large via actual items or links. They're all links. And if large inventories mess things up, I don't imagine it's because of the cache file size. It's more likely due to some silliness in the architecture that causes the SL infrastructure to thrash about as it hands knowledge of you from one sim to another.

This would be another reason Ebbe and the Lindens™ are starting from scratch for The Thing After Second Life™.

Okay, I'm done imagining. Now maybe we'll hear from someone who knows something!

ETA: Ohjiro, I don't know just how SL is designed, but if the Lindens were smart, they'd only create a new texture or geometry on the system if it was uploaded from outside. Once a thing is in-world, no matter how it's moved around (by copying, transferring, selling, etc), it's still the same thing. The system could keep track of permissions of these things as they're "replicated", but it's really only the tiny (compared to the thing) outer permission/ownership wrapper that need be updated and replicated. A necklace made of 100 spheres textured with a texture uploaded ten years ago should load only that one texture into the viewer, regardless whether the spheres were copied from each other, built independently, bought from 10 different vendors who purchased that texture in a pack, etc.

I'm not saying that SL actually works this way. I'm just saying that's how I'd do it. But I could also be overlooking a boatload of reasons to not do it that way. I've noticed no difference in performance during TP between Maddy (10K inventory) and Snugs (3K inventory), but there's a long history of people believing that large inventories degrade performance. If they're right, I think links and "actual" inventory items (which I've already said are also links) would contribute to the problem in the same way.

[Ohjiro Watanabe]

No they don't. The thing that affects performance is the time it takes to download stuff from the server. But a link doesn't doesn't download anything, it just points to the original inventory item in your local inventory.

On the other hand if you created outfits by making copies that would create new inventory items which would add to the amount of stuff you are transferring from the server.

[Lindal Kidd]

Load up your inventory with another 10-20K items and try again. I bet you'll see a performance difference.

[Madelaine McMasters]

No way, you hoarder!