Blackhole Assets is a new asset management system for Aurora-Sim. But what are assets? Assets are anything in world, in your inventory, textures you have uploaded, houses you have built. There were many problems with the old asset system.

1. Assets were stored in the database.
   • This would take up tons of database space, slow down the database, and make backups take forever
2. No duplication management
   • The same texture could be uploaded multiple times by multiple users taking up even more room in the database
3. You have no control about how large the assets download is on connection by users

With Blackhole assets we have fixed these problems. Blackhole assets fingerprint each asset. This allows the asset to be managed more effectively. On top of this we move the assets out of the database improving over all speed of querys, and reducing database backups by several gigs.

If you upload a texture more than once, we recycle that data, reducing asset footprint, download speeds, and had many other advantages.

Asset conversion from the old asset system is done on the fly. No need to spend hours of downtime to convert your old assets.

In my real world use of Blackhole assets I seen the follow

I starting with 376,000 assets..

It reduced the number of distinct assets to 83,174 Files
That mean 78% were duplicates!
Folder size was 4.84 GB Size

Database backup was 21GB
Now only 45MB + Asset Folder 4.84GB

For more details on using Blackhole assets check out How to Blackhole assets