Wandering thru the recent posts on memory and resource allocation schemes, one thing becomes quite clear. There are a ton of different ways to instrument and allocate the resources, but we won't find a good one until such time as we "Consumers" of those resources (meaning script writers) have the proper tools to accurately measure and *also* to take purposeful steps to reduce or eliminate our use of resources period.
I've seen proposals that say "we need a full-blown memory management library" .. in LSL? The language that makes BASIC look cryptic? Sorry, not buying it. How about this one instead? New statement: llEnd() - This script is done, dead, finished, kaput, pushing up the daisies .. whatever. All it had is yours again dear Sim. May it rest in peace. The only way to restart it is to manually "Reset" it. As has been mentioned, many of the most common scripts start up, do something that will persist past their lifetime, then stop. But just cuz they stopped doesn't mean they let go their 16KB (or 64KB for MONO). However, if they ended with an llEnd() statement .. no guessing needed there. The infamous "hair example"? Owner selects then "Resets" hair. Every script gets reset and comes alive. Resizer runs .. owner picks proper size and clicks "Done" ... EVERY script goes "llEnd()" End of problem. You now have hair perfectly sized (until your next shape or mood change) and you're not walking around with 200 or 1000 scripts worth of memory usage. Wanna change your hair again? No sweat .. These sorts of simple extensions to the language would give even beginning scripters the ability to write memory efficient (and thus polite) scripts without having to master the art of proper memory pool and cache management. k .. nuff said ... llEnd(); _______________________________________________ Policies and (un)subscribe information available here: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/SLDev Please read the policies before posting to keep unmoderated posting privileges
