Massive Inventory Loading Issue

Hello.

I have had the same problem for about a year, but since I have lived in two locations, I began to ignore it, until returning to one; The one with the magical Inventory Nightmare. Maybe someone can help me without directing me to the wiki or something. Please let me explain:

I have Time Warner's Broadband Internet (1.42 mb/s), a computer with 4 GB of RAM which is perfectly decent and ran like a charm at the other location. Since I have been using this other internet I have very rarely been able to load my entire inventory of 18k items. I have tryed the Second Life Viewer, Second Life Release Candidate Viewer, Cool Viewer, Rainbow Viewer, Snowglobe and Emerald Viewer with the same results. My inventory was 21k items until I deleted all my calling cards, all my landmarks, Lost and Found, Trash and many other objects. It had no effect. I have cleared the cache, deleted the cache folder, moved it, bought a second hard drive to dedicate it to its own internal drive.

I tryed once for about 3 hours logging in and out trying over and over to get it to fully load by going to a 100% empty linden sim of water, detached all my attachments and set my draw distance to the lowest setting with ALL graphics options at their lowest setting. It had no effect on my inventory loading.

It loads, then slows down to a crawl, slowly ticking away one item at a time saying its fetched around 9k items, then it stops. Shortly after the three dots at the end vanish, and my inventory is now 9k items Etc. I NEVER experience problems loading when I teleport anywhere, and I never have any other lag related issues of wireless systems and or DSL. I have also tryed different regions and beta grid to solve this problem. This has went on for several months now. I can recall about 3 different times that almost my entire inventory has loaded, oh what fond memorys...

Having a different inventory number every time I log in that is about 10k items less then my regular one, with different textures and objects missing at random (Remember, clearing my cache has no effect) is frustrating. I run a business on Secondlife, and it is very taxing. I appreciate any ideas anyone has. I am trying to figure out what could possibly be wrong here. Thank you!!!

-Will

Will, have you removed all traces of SL from your computer and done a clean install? You don't mention it in your post, although you seem to have done everything else.

If that doesn't work, the only thing I can suggest is raising a ticket, or going to Live Chat (I'm guessing you're premium since you run a business): https://secure-web11.secondlife.com/my/support/?= .

Sorry I can't be of more help - I'm not a tech maven.

Remember that they'll refuse to help you if you used a third-party viewer.

And not sure if Tigro's experience over on the Emerald forums was indicative but the Linden that went through his inventory "helpfully" deleted some duplicate items (which turned out to be different revisions of something he was working on) and other things they felt he could do without (anything in Lost and Found & Trash if I remember correctly).

You could always just contact support and start out by asking them how many items the inventory server says you have (don't settle for them logging onto your account and doing a fetch though).

Good point, Kitty, but Will says he had the same problems with the official viewer too.

I fear that the problem with some of these "helpful" Lindens is that they don't have sufficient in-world experience. In the old days I believe you had to have been active in SL for about a year before you were hired. In 2008 I even had to set a Linden straight about something quite basic (oh, the sweet heady feeling of power). She'd only had about 6 weeks experience in SL.

I'm sure they know that too, but the support script likely says "Check the list of used viewer channels for that account and if anything other than X and Y shows up then copy/paste the following and close the ticket".

If they do that to 100 people then it's likely X of them will give up rather than insist that that's not the cause of the issue so support works more efficiently (from their point of view).

That's always been the case though.

Technical Lindens are knowledgable about whatever piece of code or feature they're responsible for but beyond that they often don't know things that normal residents know.

Support Lindens are probably stuck with their own internal FAQ and scripts on how to solve problems and frequently don't know how to deal with issues that recently cropped up (ie in a recent viewer release or a recent sim update or reported JIRA issues) and also suffer from not spending much time in-world actually *using* SL (being at an office hour doesn't really count for anything).

A big reason why the old Live Help worked (every active helper could see every help chat session so we saw the answers Lindens gave) is because residents tend to have more practical knowledge or an interest in keeping up with reported JIRA bugs or simply read someone running into a problem along with how they solved it.

There are issues that absolutely need a Linden (like Will's), but even then you have a very hard time getting your problem escalated to a Linden who actually knows enough about it to actually do you any good.

Well the problem is not related to a third party viewer, thats for sure. I have had this problem for a long time, longer then Emerald and Cool Viewer existed. I have uninstalled, and went to my C:\ to completely remove any trace of SL, and reinstalled. I just tryed SL on 3 different computers today with the same problem; Hit and Miss inventory syndrome.

I have not filed a support ticket yet. Kitty you recommended a 'Fetch'? Does that mean they will just log into my account and wait for the inventory to load? I feel like it has to do with my ISP, but this has been going on for many months; There was a time when it was unaffected. Time Warner boasts how this is their 'Fast Broadband', and it does enable me to do alot. As I said before... No real loading problems in-world. The only issue is my inventory.

I was reading a post right before mine was posted "help? my inventory..". Someone posted about the Beta Grid, and I already tried that. It seems to be just as bad. Maybe at around 18k items it craps out? That is a lot of items but people have told me they have inventory's sometimes of 30k +. I have cleared my cache many times and it always starts me even further behind, so I'm guessing its just continuing to lose connection with the server hosting my inventory items? I have tried logging in at many different regions with the same problem. I will defiantly send a Ticket. Appreciate all the feedback so quickly! =)

Thanks!

Seems to me that the only thing that changed was your ISP. I would start digging there. Do they throttle bandwith?, and can you buy into a faster service?

PS. I have half the machine you do, and have run my inventory up to 40K items, with no real load issues

If you think it might be your network connection then it could be useful to have a Linden log on as you and fetch your inventory and see how far you get.

However you should definitely ask them to check how many inventory items you're supposed to have according to the inventory server.

I.e.:
* you don't get past 18,253
* the Linden gets 21,546
* the inventory server reports 24,657

In that case there's clearly a problem and asking them to check the actual real count will give you (and them) a reference number to work with.

At the very least it would tell you:
* whether or not the total number of what expected it to be (in this example you're expecting 30k but only have 24k so some would have gotten deleted server side in which case you're likely out of luck)
* whether or not the Linden gets stuck mid-way or not like you do (if they get stuck like you do then you can keep pointing out that the problem obviously isn't on your end)

And I guess add a note to consult with you before they delete anything random they think might be causing a problem.

And personally I would start with a short-ish description of the problem followed by a more detailed account of what you've all tried. The more of the obvious solutions you list that you already tried the less chance you'll get back a copy/paste "clear cache and relog" (hopefully).

Finally, be persistant .

Which proves my point - they need that experience. In the old days when new Lindens were recruited from the ranks of ordinary residents, they had that basic knowledge in addition to whatever specialist knowledge they had. Torley was a resident for about a year, I believe, before he was hired. I can see that isn't practicable these days - SL is no longer simply for tech types, so the recruitment pool in-world will be smaller - but if they hire someone on the basis of their accounting skills, they should not be allowed to give advice on anything other than billing until they've had that resident experience.

The Linden who dealt with my ticket had been in-world only a few weeks. It was a land issue involving a number of abandoned parcels. I spent quite some time verifying facts, noting coords and so on. My ticket was answered in a matter of minutes by the aforementioned newbie. She wrote me a very sharp reply, the gist of which was that I should get my facts straight before wasting LL's time. I wrote back pointing out the basic error she had made; shortly after I saw her on one of the parcels. It was a very simple issue and she could have fixed it there and then. Instead she disappeared and my ticket went unanswered for about three months. It was then picked up by an oldbie Linden who sorted it out in a matter of minutes AND sent me an email apology for the delay.

It's not good customer service, and now that LL has gone all corporate and suit-wearing, that's something they really should work on. I wonder how many times THAT'S been said in these forums.