Sweepers every 24 hours

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  • That was with a 12hr sweeper still.

    The worst one I ever saw was the Tokyo Mission Day.

    The two changes they made after that event were that the sweeper sped up to 30 minutes, and keys gained 500XM when recycling instead of 20XM.

  • Not the one from Tokyo, but this is what it used to be like on Mission Days, before they increased the sweepers.

  • phthoruthphthoruth ✭✭✭✭

    All your conclusions seem wrong. Not sure how you quote each sentence in this community system, so I'll just go thru them.

    I'm not asking for inventory space; If I were, I'd post a new discussion for that.

    I think you would like to pivot this discussion to inventory space, and then say we dont need inventory space or more gear.

    Please stop trying to change the subject. If you want to discuss inventory space, start a new discussion... I would be happy to chime in on that.


    I don't work for Niantic, but I am technical, and I'm pretty sure server storage space is not the primary cost concern.

    CPU load on server is the most direct cost, but decreasing sweepers to 24 hrs instead of 12 hrs, would save CPU cost, not increase it.

    The job would run less often.

    For me at least, it would not change the amount of capsules on the ground. The amount of gear I'm able to get and use, is not a function of sweeper time.

    For others, it might make the difference between being able to stash, and not, so maybe it would increase the number of items on the ground incrementally. But but not 2x, which is the CPU savings of reducing the sweeper job frequency.

    Reducing sweeper time would save money.


    You said youre fairly sure I dont drop items on the ground when my inventory is 1000 items. You're wrong. I do.


    Dropping out of C.O.R.E. wont affect how much gear I have. Its convenient to have it accessible in my inventory, but not having C.O.R.E. just means 5 more capsules on the ground. Whether I refresh it every 12 or 24 hours also doesnt affect those 5 capsules.

    Yes, I didnt say I'm dropping the capsules to someone else. You're trying to read between the lines and gain some intel?


    My point is, since the pandemic, we have limitations on travel and very few farms. Having a 24 hour sweeper would allow us to go out once a day. It would improve safety, convenience and encourage people to play more.

  • MoogModularMoogModular ✭✭✭✭✭

    Dropped items had a 12 hour decay since I want to say the first few months of the game before any anomalies. It was even written into the story. It even predates the Zipcar passcodes - posted on Niantic Project website on January 8, 2013

  • edited May 2021

    I'm not asking for inventory space; If I were, I'd post a new discussion for that.

    Your effective request is extra inventory space. Otherwise you wouldn't need to drop gear on the ground. If you could live within your 2000 slots + 500 keys, you wouldn't need to drop gear.

    Reducing sweeper time would save money.

    Your conclusions above don't match what Niantic has told us time and time again about items. More items = more cost. Running the street sweeper at 30 minutes during Anomalies is precisely because there is far more activity and dropped items, therefore they have to run the street sweeper faster to keep the game player.

    For me at least, it would not change the amount of capsules on the ground. The amount of gear I'm able to get and use, is not a function of sweeper time.

    It would make your use of the ground easier and therefore you probably would use more, even if you don't think you would now. That's human nature.

    You said youre fairly sure I dont drop items on the ground when my inventory is 1000 items. You're wrong. I do

    Then don't. Problem solved.

    My point is, since the pandemic, we have limitations on travel and very few farms. Having a 24 hour sweeper would allow us to go out once a day. It would improve safety, convenience and encourage people to play more.

    Not going out at all, and not using the ground as your additional storage would also be far safer. Your argument presupposes that you must use gear dropped on the ground. If you want to be safe, don't go to your secret hidey hole twice a day. Don't go at all, and stop using the ground as additional storage space.

    Anyway, I'm done. Niantic isn't going to give extra storage space, and they'll run the sweepers for performance, not how easily you can use extra space, so I don't need to argue against this idea any more.

  • HosetteHosette ✭✭✭✭✭

    Since it's relevant here as well, I'll link to my recent back-of-the-envelope calculations about the cost of inventory items. https://community.ingress.com/en/discussion/comment/140690/#Comment_140690

    The TL;dr: If my math is correct then cost of one single firework is more than enough to pay for the inventory of eight players for a year.

  • Storage isn't the only cost.

    Most cloud services charge for reads/writes as well.

    In the case of the sweepers, having to read x items every time an agent enters the area for 12hours or 24 hours makes a huge difference

  • phthoruthphthoruth ✭✭✭✭

    Thats a useful reference on storage, so I'll post it here:

    When you're trying to make a product profitable selling just one more item to someone will probably cover the entire cost of storing their inventory for at least a year. Let's do some math using a well-known cloud provider.


    DynamoDB storage is $0.25/GB/month. S3 storage is about a tenth of that, but let's assume it needs to be in a database so a gigabyte of storage is $3/year. I don't know how much storage it takes to consume one object but let's use an estimate that's probably an order of magnitude too high and say 1K. If that's the case then that $3/year would pay for storage for about 350K items worth of storage, or the inventory of 140 players. The cheapest non-recyclable item is fireworks, at 333 CMU per. The cheapest CMU I can find is 200K for $100. That comes out to $0.17. If I've done the math correctly, buying one fireworks 3-pack would pay for the storage of around 25 players for a year. (Note, I'm too lazy to check my math.)


    I'm only including storage costs, and not access, compute, etc. for the inventory. However, I also grossly overestimated the size of storing an object-- a GUID is 16 bytes, not 1K, so I've overestimated by a factor of 64 so I'm probably overestimating even including compute and access costs. Thus, I conclude that the cost of one single firework is more than enough to pay for the inventory of eight players for a year.

  • phthoruthphthoruth ✭✭✭✭

    Wouldnt that make the cost less with 24 hour sweepers?

    The job runs less often. The users pick up/drop items less often.

    The number of items isnt changed, just the frequency.

  • It's not the removal that is the costly bit, it's the loading of the items EVERY time someones scanner is near them.

    Each time the area is loaded in the scanner, it needs to read them.

    The sooner they get removed, the less they need to load.

  • phthoruthphthoruth ✭✭✭✭

    That sounds like a potential issue for anomalies where thousands of keys are on the ground.

    But not an issue during regular times, and mostly its been keys that have been problematic.

    Do different items sweep with different age? If so, keys could be swept at faster interval, such as 4 hours.

    Its also symptomatic that keys are hard to manage / recycle. I'd like a way to filter keys by faction, so I could put friendly keys in a locker and recycle enemy keys. But thats a different topic


    My example of keeping capsules on the ground doesnt affect the quantity. And I do try to keep them in places people dont see, so the few players that are playing arent impacted much by a few capsules, in places they don't go.

  • HosetteHosette ✭✭✭✭✭

    @XQlusioN I pointed exactly that out at the end of my discussion. I did the storage costs calculations with the assumption that an item required 1K of storage, then wrote this at the end:

    I'm only including storage costs, and not access, compute, etc. for the inventory. However, I also grossly overestimated the size of storing an object-- a GUID is 16 bytes, not 1K, so I've overestimated by a factor of 64 so I'm probably overestimating even including compute and access costs. Thus, I conclude that the cost of one single firework is more than enough to pay for the inventory of eight players for a year.

    In terms of server costs there's clearly a curve. Running sweepers every 60 seconds would be computationally expensive, far more so than having some number of items on the ground. Running them never would cost nothing for sweeping but become computationally expensive for tracking everything as players moved around. There's clearly a sweet spot somewhere in the middle and I suspect that during normal day-to-day play that spot is pretty broad. It's hard for me to imagine there's a huge difference between 12 and 24 hours, for example. It's also clear that this curve changes dramatically when a large number of players are gathered in a small area playing very aggressively for a period of time, both because more items are dropped and because they are accessed so frequently. (There's also a player frustration curve for this case that's outside the scope of this discussion.)

    My bona fides: My $DAYJOB is in operations for a very large well-known website, and computational frugality is always on my radar.

  • A question was asked. That question was answered. It is an answer that we all know to be true. The game has limits on gear for a reason. If the pandemic keeps you from going out to farm it also keeps you from needing gear as well

  • It's almost like you're assuming that Interns write all the code, and the money goes just into the servers.

  • Because cost is a factor. I've also raised on numerous threads debating this point that there are other considerations such as "Inventory Management is a part of the game" but since you attempted to "prove" the money aspect, I just wanted to remind you that Cost is not just storage, even though that's 100% your area of expertise.

    Niantic spends at least $2 mil a year on Ingress staff salaries (just rough figures based on numbers and average California tech wages), so Cost is always going to be a factor.

    Some people, including you apparently, don't think the game should be played the way some people are playing it even though it's well within the rules.

    And you've consistently ignored the references to the law of unintended consequences. Just because you can play the game that way doesn't mean they want to make it worse. As I said previously, this whole discussion may invigorate an internal discussion on increasing the sweeper's frequency.

  • GorillaSapiensGorillaSapiens ✭✭✭✭✭

    @Perringaiden @KonnTower @Hosette @CliffM I love how all y'all are having heated arguments about how the underlying servers work, when none of you are actually on the dev team. I also love the claims about what's in memory versus what's on the hard drive, when modern database servers are a bit more complicated than that. They pick and choose what they put where and when. I also love the arguments about how often the sweeper should run. If I drop one capsule, then wait 11 hours, then drop a second capsule right next to it, do the two capsules disappear at the same time? I don't think so. I think the second capsule I dropped will stay on the ground for 12 hours. From that I would speculate that whatever process that sweeps these things up is not "running once every 12 hours". It would be foolish to speculate any further on how frequently this sweeper process runs.

  • HosetteHosette ✭✭✭✭✭

    @GorillaSapiens That would actually be an interesting argument. Get a bunch of X1s or something, drop one every hour, and then watch what happens.

    My prediction, based on nothing but observation and intuition, is that sweepers run X times per day and will remove anything that's been on the ground more than Y hours. Let's say that X=2 (twice per day) and Y=12 (12 hour limit). Let's arbitrarily pick noon and midnight as the sweeper times. If you drop something at 1 p.m. then the midnight sweeper wouldn't do anything because it's only been on the ground for 11 hours, but the noon sweeper the next day would pick it up.

  • KonnTowerKonnTower ✭✭✭✭✭

    @GorillaSapiens so, how did you even decide to come here after the last post was May of 2021??? That was almost 17 months ago.


    Stop necro'ing

  • Two points:

    1. This is a 6 month old thread. You're complaining about us while trolling months old threads.
    2. We know how the sweeper works in concept because Niantic staff told us years ago.
    • A process runs every x minutes (used to be 15 minutes, may be slower now).
    • Every item that is on the game field and not in someone's inventory is checked for it's appearance date.
    • If the appearance date is < 12hrs ago, it will be removed.
    • During events, the number of hours before it disappears, may be reduced for performance.

    That's how it works as a concept. That part isn't a question.

    Discussing cost and other issues is completely unrelated to the operation of the sweeper itself, and completely related to data storage and processing, something that is not specific to Ingress or even Niantic, but a common thing for cloud developers to understand and discuss. And we know the average salary of an LA software developer, and the rough numbers of staff on the team.

    So yeah, if you can't make the logical connections from the information presented, that's not our problem.

  • HosetteHosette ✭✭✭✭✭
    edited November 2022

    @Perringaiden I'm sure you mean greater-than rather than less-than. Inaccuracy undermines pedanticism.

  • edited November 2022

    Sure. Earlier than 12hrs ago.

    Note: In code it would be.

    If Appearance Date < (Current Date - 12 hrs) then destroy.

    Code brain doesn't always convert to speak brain.

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