Inventory window effects framerate

Because I was working on my Linden World build I had all the performance monitors open and I noticed something weird:

My frame rate was running about 30fps at the time, then I opened my inventory, and it was still around 30fps, then I expanded my "Objects" folder and my framerate dropped about 10fps immediately.

Has anyone else noticed this?

Confirmed.

1st: you should clean out your object folder! Sheesh! It took me openeing every folder I had including my trash to drop my frame rate from about 41fps to 19fps.

Definatly interesting and from what I can tell directly related to the number of objects the inventory screen has displayed (even off screen .... the number of objects you could scroll though).

Other notes: The Gestures Window dropped my frame rate about 4fps or so.

Openeing every other UI window I could find (not the debug ones though) dropped it maybe 2fps max total. I'm sitting at 15fps right now.

edit: Woah forgot the world map - that brings it down another 5fps quick.

Lyn discovered that also having a huge trash can drop the frame rate open or not. I tried it and sure enough.

I also cleaned out like 400 items from my total inventory, and found a nice improvement in game play.

Is there realtime data being sent back and forth between the client and servers? Thats the only explanation I can find for it.

There isn't enough inventory data moving to/from the servers to have any lasting effect on your framerate. But, while it's open, the inventory window needs to draw itself every frame and it's a fairly complex operation. I think there may also be some level of processing done on your inventory even when it's not open.

No doubt this is something we could speed up, but so far it's taken a back seat to new features and optimizations to the 3d engine. However, it's good that you folks pointed out how big a difference a slow inventory can make. For the time being, hey, empty your trash.

I have something similar, I think. Whenever I open my inventory (or do something that causes it to open, such as take an object to inventory or upload a texture (actually, deleting too, which DOESN'T even open the inventory, yet saves something to it)) causes my client to hang for about 5 to 10 seconds. It's *very* annoying..someone told me to delete my cache, which I did, didn't help. :/

have you tried cleaning up your inventory james? Emptying your trash and cleaning out the stuff you don't need?

Ama, I need it all. No, seriously, I have no intention of EVER cleaning my inventory out. In 5 years, I'm going to rez those 200 "Objects" and laugh at all the stupid things I kept.

Thanks for the response Ian. Note that with just my inventory open, the framerate is not effected too much, it's only when I open a folder with a lot (a lot) of objects in it, even though most of that is off screen. So it seems like the client or video card is doing work for items that are off screen, enough to seriously effect framerate.

Now I'm going to go off on a rant. It's easy to just whang a UI on and say "it works, it doesn't really matter, we can fix it up later, as long as it works it's ok", but you see, it's not, you get unintended consequences like this. The way the inventory works now, it's pretty much impossible to keep it neat and tidy, AND if the UI was fixed tomorrow, a lot of people sould still just have everything in their "Objects" folder, beacuse it's so out of control now it would be too much hassle to organize.

Consider the following, I do a bulk upload of 5 textures starting with the letter 'w', now I want to move them in a folder. Never mind issues with the texture picker for now, I just want to move them to a folder.

I have to find the textures, and then ONE AT A TIME, select, drag it up to the top, scroll scroll scroll scroll scroll scroll scroll scroll scroll scroll scroll scroll scroll scroll scroll scroll scroll scroll scroll scroll scroll scroll scroll scroll scroll scroll scroll scroll scroll scroll scroll scroll scroll scroll scroll scroll scroll scroll scroll scroll scroll scroll scroll scroll scroll scroll scroll scroll scroll scroll scroll scroll scroll scroll scroll scroll scroll scroll scroll scroll scroll scroll scroll scroll scroll scroll scroll scroll scroll scroll scroll scroll scroll scroll scroll scroll scroll scroll scroll scroll scroll scroll scroll scroll scroll scroll scroll, drop, repeat. Better to just leave them where they are then spend 5 minutes futzing with the mouse.

Just adding group select for inventory items would help so much. But we need a new UI now, not at some time in the indeterminate future. Visual candy is nice, but a lack of useablility is a killer.

There's an easier way. Open a second Inventory window (File menu, New Window), position it right next to your first one, and make sure your target folder is visible in it. You can then drag your textures from one Inventory window to the other.

(This tip originally posted by Nada Epoch, I believe.)

That's true, but that's just one example of what I'm talking about.

How many people know how to open a second inventory window? It's not obvious.

In the first inventory window, there's a menu at the top of the window, it's in there.

James for those objects you wont use but want to open in 5 years try this trick, I have a few hundred scripts/objects that I hardly use, so I put them into an object and save the object to my inventory, "virtual zip folder"? lol but that could help with inventory lag maybe for those things you still want but hardly use.

Here's a completely crazy idea that can't possibly work so please ignore it. Wait, that's overstating things. I'll start again...

Here's a thought: 1) I can run Windows Explorer on top of SL, my internet browser, what have you, and it doesn't seem to effect my performance (I'm running SL windowed). 2) I can't stand how clunky our inventory works and I wish it worked just like Windows Explorer.

Could you make our inventory a seperate Windows application, taking advantage of all the functions Windows makes available to applications to get that Windows Explorer functionality and then have it communicate with the servers on its own? It could be started along with SL and kind of "super minimized" like the way objects are minimized to the system tray only you could leave out the system tray icon. Then you maximize it over the SL window when you hit the inventory button in SL. Bingo, all your functionality, no framerate drain, everyone's happy.

And yes, I do live in a land of makebelieve, why do you ask?

YES!

That sounds alot like my unanswered "Floating" windows option I asked for

I think every window that popsup in SL should have a float option.

Inv
Editor
Scripts
Notes

ETC...you get the point