Asklemmy

Simply put.

We wouldn't notice anything.

Our perception of the world would be based only on the compute cycles and not on any external time-frame.

The machine could run at a Million Billion hertz or at one clock-cycle per century and your perception of time inside the machine would be the same.

Same with low ram, we would have no indication if we were constantly being paged out to a hard drive and written back to ram as required.

Greg Egan gave a great explanation of this in the opening chapter of his Novel Permutation City

An automatic purge process will start to prevent this. It happened several times in the past. Last time between 2019-2022. It removed circa 7 million processes. With regular purges like this it is made sure that the resources are not maxed out before the admins can add more capacity.

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.

If our entire universe is a simulation so are our laws of physics, in the parent universe running our simulation the universe might be powered by pure imagination and the concept of memory or CPU cycles or even electricity might not even exist

I did not expect the responses to this question to be as interesting to read as they are 😃

Maybe we’re already there and death is just the garbage collector freeing up more space.

Couldn't they just suspend the simulation until they got more resources? We wouldn't notice a thing.

Allthat shit you forgot? All that "forgotten" history? There you go.

Render distance would be reduced requiring us to come up with plausible theories to account for the fact that there is a limit to the size of the so-called ‘observable universe’

They take some users offline to free up some memory for everyone else

Without knowing the nature of the simulation, we don't even know if there is an analogue for RAM or limited memory. Maybe you could walk in and out a door repeatedly and then glitch into a locked room. Maybe the whole thing would crash - our programs tend to do this when memory runs out. Maybe everything would just get paused or "adjusted down" to fit the restriction. The crash, pause or throttle wouldn't be apparent to us "on the inside" at all if it were happening.

I know exactly what would happen. It...uhh, what was I gonna say again? It just slipped out, it'll come back...

We would probably see more caching of parts of the universe that don't typically observe. Given that our current observation can't see this in current time, we don't immediately notice.

The interesting bit would be to figure out what parts get cached, since we may not be the only sentient life.

Have you not played Dwarf Fortress? Frame rate goes way down, a situation imperceptible to the dorfs. Then eventually the operator of the machine looses interest, or a oandemic makes the pop count drop, or a combo of those.

Edit; You should read some Greg Egan if you're into this question.

@aCosmicWave we all just start moving more slowly.

Fortunately I can report that if anything, we"re having RAM added, because everything keeps speeding up as I get older.

We go to sleep and it clears

Human sacrifice. Dogs and cats living together. Mass hysteria.

I'm more concerned with what happens when the hardware invariably fails...

Why do you think our admins wouldn't use autoscale, when they've obviously built it into the simulation?

I imagine it shows itself where processes get dropped, whether it’s walking into a room and forgetting what you were doing, losing train of thought mid sentence, or even passing out when you laid down to watch something.

How would you know what physics runs the host universe? For all we know, things like ram limitations doesn't even apply there

Teleportation based on old location data being deleted

adjacent answer, but resource requirements are lower than might be expected since the simulation only needs to capture elements observed by a conscious entity. the vast majority of the known universe has not been observed in any detail that requires significant memory or processing resources. this same technique is employed by computer game designers so that only scenery and elements within view of a player are fully rendered.

Starts with erectile dysfunction and ends with the little blue pill...

Human music. Huh. I like it!

I am the only person who lives in the simulaton. You all are computer generated.

For a simulation as complex and powerful as the universe. we would be running in a Real-Time OS. So applications couldn't even run if the resources weren't sufficient.

Well, if we're in a simulation, then any assumptions we have about definitions, limitations, they may not apply. So, we think storage needs ram, but outside our restricted simulation, it could be far different.

Like, I frequently ponder how did something come from nothing. But I know I'm making assumptions when I ask that question. It may not be linear, may not be either or, there's something crucial im not seeing.

This is why older people think slower and lose memories or cognitive functions as side effects. They are depriorizized and moved from ram to pagefiles/swap disk.

If you're unfamiliar, the OS will move process memory onto disk when RAM runs out.

once we run out of ram then the universe starts running on Skyrim physics