Decay Alternatives

[Rockinsince87]

I like that idea better too Dean. Have the city enter a freeze state after x amount of days, when someone shows up the star system is pulled out of stasis and restart the clock.

From a storage perspective, I don't see this being an issue either and you'll stop the wasted compute threads and excess SQL transactions from the servers but there is still another major issue.

Database bloat in general. The database would still have to search and index the information. After a while database queries would take longer and longer. Currently database systems will use their performance optimizers and cache the most used data in system memory for faster processing. That's fine and all but you then you'll require some serious RAM in your database servers. When I say serious I'm talking 512GB to TBs and on top of that the storage subsystems would need to be very fast.  

There still has to be some form of automated data retention expiration. Or a automated system moves systems that are in stasis to an archive database that only exists for this reason or you just increase the decay system to 90 days or something.