Hard drive churning

Why is it that when in Second Life my high-end computer will sometimes start it's hard drive churning noisily and just not seem to be able to stop? If I quite SL and turn it back on it will be fine for a while but then it always seems to start up again.

Are others experiencing this? What causes it? I use other 3D programs and don't experience this, only in SL.

SL pushes your computer to the max at all times. Constant hard drive access.

I agree, Briana. Nothing works my computer like SL, not even if I have PhotoShop CS4 & 3D Studio Max running at the same time. Which makes me wonder if SL actually needs to be using the resources it does.

I upgraded to 8Gig of Ram, thinking it would help. Other 3d games that have pretty much everything on your hard drive don't make it churn like SL does. There are times I leave my avatar still, looking out to nothing but LL water and walk away from the computer. The hard drive will continue to churn. What the heck is it doing?

SL utilizes a relatively small cache to keep track of an enormous amount of constantly changing data. Other programs like games are almost completely static, so they don't need to do that. There's no direct comparison there.

A better comparison would be to think of SL more like a database (because that's really what it is) than like a video game. Imagine a more typical database, say, something like Wikipedia. Now imagine how crazy the hard drive usage must be on the machines on which that database is stored. Files are constantly being opened, closed, written, and rewritten by thousands of users. The hard drives on Wikipedia's servers likely never get a free moment to catch their breath.

SL is doing a very similar thing. The client software is constantly opening, closing, writing, and rewriting the files in the cache. Whatever drive that cache resides on is going to go nuts as a result.

This is one reason it's so super important to keep your hard drive in good shape for best performance in SL. All that writing and rewriting will frag a drive to Hell and back in no time flat. At the very least, you should defrag every few days if you use SL every day. A better solution, though, is to invest in a good third-party auto-defrag program (Windows' built-in defragger really sucks). I recommend Diskeeper. It does a fantastic job. If you want a less expensive solution, though, O&O Defrag is also very good.

Chosen - thanks! That was an excellent explanation. I do understand the difference now and I think I'll do a defrag a little more often

Another possibility is that you are continuously page swapping because your memory is full. Since you have a high-end machine, I imagine you have plenty of RAM ... but this can happen if SL is competing with other application(s) that are memory intensive. For example, both Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Word are unfriendly memory hogs. Indexing programs can also cause a lot of memory paging -- sometimes you can be running a continuous indexing program without realizing it -- Nero Scout is notorious for this.

Try shutting everything down before you start SL.

Huh... for some reason I always assumed the cache was in RAM.

Idea: What if there was an option (for people with sufficient memory) to have the working cache in RAM, and then periodically have it write to HDD - so it will persist after SL is shut down?

[Edit] On second thought, that would probably be a bad idea... since player create assets are almost never optimized in the first place, it would eat up ram quickly.

Using Vista?

follow this article to reduce it:

http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleID=2262

Well, you can't ever hear my hard drives period, they are noiseless at all times in my experience with them over a year.

However my brother's Hard Drives for example are loud as hell when doing basically anything, so if you hear your drive a lot then it's probably just the drive itself, but it doesn't have to be a bad thing.

Well, yes and no. The stuff you're currently looking at is in active memory while you're looking at it, yes. But the information the active memory is pulling from is on the hard drive. If you'd like to know where on your drive it is, take a look at your Network tab in your SL preferences. You'll see a field for disk cache. You can put it wherever you want.




People have experimented with putting the cache on a RAMdisk. The reported performance gains have been negligible. It does cut down on hard drive activity, of course, but in my opinion that's not worth the effort of setting it up.

As for the size getting out of hand, that's not really an issue. The cache always has an assigned maximum size. The default maximum is up to 1000 MB. You can make it larger with a little hack, but from what I've read, there's no benefit in doing that. It can actually decrease, rather than increase, performance, as the viewer has trouble indexing so many files.