long pause on start, really long

I don't know why this is - SL runs fine for the most part (except for a crash where you get sucked off into the distance, which doug told me should be fixed in the next release), except for when I first start. This doesn't seem to happen if I say, crash, then have to start again. But on my first start of the night, SL will open, I'll get in world, and my computer will just sort of sit there 'thinking', HD light on non-stop, ticking away, for about 10-15 minutes. This gets extremely annoying and I don't know why it's happening...is this happening for anyone else? Any suggestions?

specs:
intel 800mhz
256mb ram
windowsxp pro
geforce4 mx420 64mb pci

thanks...

maki

This is a known bug that only affects Windows XP users. As best we can tell, shortly after Second Life starts up, Windows decides to read in the entire cache file from start to finish, but it's not really clear why. Windows 2000 and 98/Me, don't do this.

Currently your only recourse is to reduce the size of the cache file - it's in the General tab of the Preferences Window. The smaller it is, the less time it takes to read, so the shorter your pause will be. On the flip side, a smaller cache file means you'll have to spend more time downloading textures and other assets after you log in. It's up to you.

Unfortunately it doesn't look like we'll be able to fix this in time for the next release, but we should get it resolved eventually.

ok, thank you! I suppose I can live with it in the meantime - just startup SL and go afk for about 15 minutes.. Still though, that's 15 minutes of quality SL time..! Hopefully it can be fixed soon. hehe.

maki

Happens to me. Every night. Seems to hang but hard drive is going. Little green bar isn't moving though. So I kill it and restart and then I get right in. It's my nightly routine to kill and restart.

Kerstin

I'm using XP home and it takes me about 10 seconds to get in world. I think it has more to do with your hardware ( ok, maybe a combination of hardware & XP).

I'm running a P-IV 2.4ghz, 512meg ram, gforce4 ti4600, so I don't know if my computer speed or the additional memory on the video card that makes the difference, that's for you tech types.

Hope this info helps figure it out.

Tracey

One thing I forgot to mention in my first post is that this only happens the first time you start Second Life after you've booted your computer. This is why Kerstin doesn't have the delay on the second run. Also, people who leave their machine on all the time should basically never see this... so if it's worth it to you, you can also try never shutting down.

The duration of the delay will of coure vary greatly based on your hardware, the principal factor being the speed of your hard disk. (an oft-overlooked performance factor in PCs)

I still get this, but, my PC is on 24/7. It isn't bad though, its usually about 2 minutes, and I simply will do control alt delete and close the process newview.exe, cause I am very impatient. Then I will reloggin and I am in right away. Running XP Home.

Sorry Ian... but I spoke to Doug last night about that. The reason for the HD hang (with win XP only) is that for some reason WinXP reads the whole SL cache... what you can try doing is deleting the whole cache. My HD was hanging for like 5 minutes. (My cache is (or was) 890megs) try to delete all thoses files!

What a couple of you said you do, restart SL - hehe, well, if I try to close SL using the taskmanager (ctrl alt delete) thing that'll make my comp really flip out, it'll lose control and start locking up worse, so I just wait that out. So I guess it probably is longer because of my hardware...

maki

I'm running athalon 2100+, 512 meg ram, geforce 4 ti4600 and I do have the big pause....(don't think vid card makes the difference ...maybe you just have your cache settings lower...(that's my guess anyway

(just providing more info into the mix


Valfaroth Grimm

I've encountered this problem myself. The game seems to hang in XP. But if I press ctrl alt del the task manager shows it not responding. If I wait about 5 seconds it changes to running and the game loads up just fine.

Well folks, the new version (0.4) has a workaround for this problem. It's... questionable however, and we're working with Microsoft to find the root cause.

If you use XP and you continue to see this long pause just after startup, please post here. I'd like to figure out whether the workaround is completely or only partially effective.

I have a problem with newview.exe, but I'm not sure if it is the same. I usually don't have a problem getting into SL, but once I'm in, my map won't load, nor will my inventory. I've waited for about half an hour and my inventory never loaded. When I went to quit, the program stopped immediatly (instead of the minute it usually takes to log location, etc.) and it says that there was a failure loading newview.exe.

This has happened more and more over the last few days, up to the point that I'm almost afraid to try rebooting at any point for fear of not regaining access to SL.

Every time I crash, (usually by dissappearing off the map) it says that the failure was in Newview.exe as well...

I have XP, but it precaches relatively quickly, The map and the inventory are the only things it seems to have an issue with.