Retirement Rule, May 06, 2005 When a new sheep is pushed onto the server queue, an old sheep is retired. Says spot: ========================================================= after a sheep finishes rendering (is born), then the sizes of all living sheep are summed. if the quota is exceeded then sheep are deleted until it is satisfied. the sheep with the lowest ratings is deleted first, ties broken by oldest first. normally there is a tie for rating 0, so the oldest sheep is deleted, like a queue. and since the sheep are pretty consistently 4.5 megs, it's length doesn't vary much. there are no hard & fast rules though. i as the admin occasionally kill sheep as i see fit. eg if it's damaged in some way (every once in a while a client joins that renders bad frames and ruins a few sheep until i ban their IP#), or i just really don't like it and yet it has votes anyway somehow ========================================================= and here is an emendation by ralph: there must be a distinction between temp-rating R(t) and max rating R_max for if an old sheep has temp-rating R and gets no more votes, then temp-rating goes rapidly to zero by the rule: R(t+1) = floor [ ( R(t) + no new votes ) / 4 ] while max-rating does not decline thus retirement must depend on R(t) rather than R_max ========================================================= end