Assuming our simulation is not designed to auto-scale (and our Admins don’t know how to download more RAM), what kind of side effects could we see in the world if the underlying system hosting our simulation began running out of resources?
Data in memory will be offloaded to swap space. I doubt we’d notice any fluctuations since we’re part of the simulation, but externally it could slow to a crawl and basically be useless. They might shut it down, hopefully just to refactor. But again we probably wouldn’t notice any downtime, even if it’s permanent.
Not sure you’ve experienced the end of many SimCity games if you think this is the case. 😂
If anything, the earth lately kinda feels like someone’s gotten bored with the game.
iirc this is a plot point in the book “Fall; or, Dodge in Hell” by Neal Stephenson (sequel to Reamde). At some point the virtual world slows to a crawl so much that people outside of it cannot really track what is going on but it’s transparent to those inside the world. I might be misremembering exactly how it was implemented.
