BaggersNov 7, 2024
Ritesh Oedayrajsingh Varma

Whenever we assume some kind of bounded N in Superluminal, we inevitably end up regretting it.

“How many DLLs could an application possibly load?”

Turns out the answer to that question is “at least 113440”, somewhat higher than our estimate of “probably no more than a few hundred”.
https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@sschoener/113441636130821884

Sebastian Schöner (@[email protected])

Once installed, I decided to open all the projects, to get codesearch. After a few minutes I decided to take a trace. The trace was behaving weirdly in Superluminal, and debugging (thank you, Jelle and Ritesh!) revealed that in the trace 113440 modules are loaded and unloaded. Whoops. That's a lot. Let's make a mental note of that number here. But somewhat anticlimatically this is not the main issue here.

Gamedev Mastodon
Nov 7, 2024 at 2:58pmWeb
Show threadRitesh Oedayrajsingh VarmaNov 7, 2024

Previously, in mistakes of the same trend: “how many threads could an application possibly have?”

Answer: at least 80000 (eightythousand).

Show threadRitesh Oedayrajsingh VarmaNov 7, 2024
In general, I guess you could say that, and I say this with love, assuming any kind of sanity in the applications being profiled with Superluminal is a mistake :-)
Show threadAras PranckevičiusNov 7, 2024
@rovarma yeah, “just how many could there possibly be?” answer, over large enough set of users, is “way more than you could have imagined”. https://aras-p.info/blog/2017/02/05/Every-Possible-Scalability-Limit-Will-Be-Reached/
Every Possible Scalability Limit Will Be Reached · Aras' website

Aras' website
Show threadRitesh Oedayrajsingh VarmaNov 7, 2024
@aras hah, nice! it has definitely been a progression over the years. I remember being proud at launch that we could open captures that were several whole gigabytes in size. That seems almost quaint in a “aww, isn’t that cute?” way looking back now, with users that are regularly opening > 100 GB captures taken on many core machines.
Show threadMichael CouplandNov 8, 2024
@aras @rovarma
Similar to “Hyrum's Law” -
https://www.hyrumslaw.com
Hyrum's Law

Show threadArseny KapoulkineNov 7, 2024
@rovarma @sschoener Presumably that’s load/unload cycles and not unique DLLs?
Show threadRitesh Oedayrajsingh VarmaNov 7, 2024
@zeux @sschoener yeah, indeed — a set of “only” a few hundred DLLs or so being loaded & unloaded over and over for each of the 477 projects in the solution
Show threadSebastian SchönerNov 7, 2024
@rovarma @zeux Yep. I think what it is doing is loading all transitive dependencies to see whether there are multiple versions of the same assembly in the project. For Unity Engine assemblies, the vast majority of the dependencies are going to be identical between those assemblies.