On Sat, 25 Mar 2000, Chris Proctor wrote:
>On Fri, 24 Mar 2000, Pat O'Laughlin wrote:
>
>> I have come across a bug on my MUD. ID Numbers on new characters are for some
>> reason being created EXTREMELY large. Right now, they are around 25690519.
>> They still are created in consecutive order but somehow they skipped a few million
>> numbers. This doesn't seem like a major problem, but if it is I would like to know. If
>> anyone knows why this happens and how to fix it, please let me know.
>
>The same thing happened to me a while ago.
>It ended up being a server problem, the playerfile was being blown out to
>a sparse file containing several thousand empty records.
>I could get it back down to normal size by doing a purge, but it kept
>happening. The playerfile was also displaying as being 200Mb or so (rather
>than 4->8 as it is normally).
If you're on a Unix machine, the 200 MB is not the real size of the file.
That system has the capability (on most filesystems) to have files with
"holes" in it. This means that if you have one record at the beginning of
the file and one record 50 MB into the file, you only take up 2 (or 2)
blocks (1kB to 4kB usually) on the disk, not the full 50 MB.
I don't have a good example (except for GNU libc, I think), but there's a
program to make holes in files that don't already have them:
http://metalab.unc.edu/pub/Linux/utils/file/hole.lsm
Try it out on something with large runs of NUL (0) characters.
--
George Greer | The OasisOLC Maintenance Effort
greerga@circlemud.org | http://developer.circlemud.org/OasisOLC/
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