Solved What's the deal with storing players?

I keep seeing people say not to store players but nobody ever seems to explain why not? Care to enlighten me?

Also when they say "store" do they mean just don't store it in global hash maps and lists or don't ever declare a Player variable no matter how low scope and temporary?

Much appreciation to anyone who can clarify this confusion.

 

Mostly, memory leaks.

When a player logs off their player object should be released to memory. Storing that in a plugin prevents that from happening.

 

I see, so that really shouldn't be an issue for passing variables and temporary local variables then, right?

 

No it would not.

 

Really, storing Players is a problem if you aren't removing them when Players quit.

 

Gotcha, I'll keep that in mind. In most cases I try to keep storage as small of a construct as possible anyway as to not waste the server's memory. A String is smaller than a Player and retrieving the player has very little CPU impact.

 

Alshain01
When you store a Player, you're just storing the reference, which is about as large in memory as a String.