This is why the Hubble telescope had mirror problems and James Webb was so delayed. The admins had to sneak delays into the simulation while they upgraded the hardware to render more of the universe.

A semi related but enlightening (thought) experiment.

There is a theory that our universe isn't actually 3D is actually a projection/simulation on the 2D surface of a black hole (aka the big bang). If this were the case, then the practical differences would be almost nonexistent. The exception is the planck length. This is the smallest length that is meaningful. If our universe is 3D, we are extremely far from being able to measure effects anywhere close to the planck length. If it is 2D however, that length appears FAR bigger. It wouldn't be that far below what our current gravity wave detectors can see.

The effects of this would be similar to a simulation running near its limit. It would be the equivalent to floating point rounding errors.

Ever walk into a room and forget why you went in there? That's garbage collection

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

You get stuff like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_Winner and the same movie/media coming out over and over again

We download more RAM.

The server shuts down. Admin adds in few more sticks of ram and powers it on again.

The day is reset and we wake up again from the morning of that day where there was a RAM shortage.

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

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

We are the RAM

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

Probably a mass removal of the poor - oh wait that's already happening.

Given the vastness of space and time, the. Umber of people who die and have yet to learn anything (babies), I’d imagine we’re a system with 32gb of RAM, only consuming a few hundred megabytes.

Besides, I’d imagine that any intelligence capable of constructing and running such a complex simulation would have the ability to scale their system as needed. Using our existing technology, they probably use hot swappable components so that if there is a hardware failure or the need to “download more ram” 🤣 then they can just remove and insert new components on the fly and we’d be none the wiser.

Of course, we being part of the simulation, I’d also wager that unless the creators of said simulation are truly evil and sadistic, we’ll never know because it’s just not part of the programming. And if not we’re, we’d probably already have figured it out by now (beyond guessing and thought experiments). But rest assured, it is fun to think about, in a creepy and existential way.

If we are a simulation, what is the end goal of our creators? Could we be the roadmap for creating anew world in their real life? Maybe they are studying their own history and trying to figure out how their race came into being and evolved over time. Or maybe we are part of a crude video game keeping little Suzie occupied until dinner time. Better yet, maybe Susan is learning about simulations at university and we are part of her post-doctoral thesis.

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.

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.

There would either be some kind of mass extinction event or something that would be considered "supernatural" would occur to maintain the status quo

Who knows.. maybe we'll experience pointless wars and massive inequality.. selfish douchebags who only care about bolstering their ego might gain power.. heck, maybe even the climate will slowly start changing for the worse.

The universe starts swapping

The server admins run a kill -9 on a few processes. Inside the sim, this looks a lot like the Chicxulub impact.

You should check out the short story "Sleepover" by Alastair Reynolds.

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.

Stutterers

Teleportation based on old location data being deleted