Question About Alt Accounts

This.

Performing is a good notion to bring up. Some of us do sometimes see SL as a bit of performance art. A portable traveling show. It can be good fun to don a new suit and tour the sims so to speak. Long as others seem to be laffing it up as well.

Add " --multiple" (without the quotes but with the leading space) to the end of the Target line in the desktop icon's Properties. Then you can open and run multiple instances of the viewer, each logging in a different avatar/account.

(Melita - this a year old thread )

Simply having a lot of registered accounts has ZERO impact on your SL response time. The only thing that affects it is how many you are concurrently logged in with, and how much inventory each of them has for the concurrently logged in accounts.

An account that is not logged in has no more impact on the ones that ARE logged in than the book on your bookshelf has on the book you're reading. An alt uses no resources just for existing. It might use some disk space for its cache files, but that is about all. So unless you are really almost out of disk space, it shouldn't matter.

(edit: Hadn't noticed that someone necroposted a year-old thread here...)

Mac users, don't try this at home.

Also, if your computer (PC's only here... sorry) has hyperthreading or multiple cores, use WinLauncher XP to assign each instance of your viewer to a separate thread or core.

If they are not on simultaneously how could your computer be slowed down at al? It is not like it checks how many accounts you have before you login or such.

If you are on with more than one account at a time the rate of slowdown all depends on your client machine. You will notice some slowdown though (particularly slow loading textures) when you just have just 2 accounts on.

Noooo ......

Assuming a standard setup (and only one SL viewer) that is precisely what you do not want to do. Each account will have it's own list of what it thinks should be there.

The easiest solution is to have multiple different viewers (like a copy of Emerald and a copy of Snowglobe) that will use different caches. Failing that, modify your command line arguments to tell SL to use different cache directories.

Well, maybe not on YOUR mac but I routinely run 2 SL accounts at the same time on my iMac. Although rather than windows shortcuts there is an arguments.txt file in the application icon's folder.

Actually I used to log in 2 at once on a mac. But I will be danged if I can remember how now. It IS possible though.

Finally, a helpful, informative, and accurate post.

Note that multiple clients also use more bandwidth (which is a resource, of course). However, you can help minimize bandwidth use by setting your graphics draw distance (in preferences) low (e.g., 64). Of course, if you're moving a lot in the sim, that has the opposite effect.

Also consider setting your graphics settings to "low" for all the windows except perhaps one. I don't know whether this will count for much when the others are minimized, but it might help and can't hurt.

And that's the other item: minimize the other SL windows, as much as feasible.

Turn off all unnecessary programs.

Install more memory on your computer, if possible -- this could be a big help.

Please don't feed the trolls, dear!

I believe tat there's an advantage to using the same viewer for all avatars. The memory used by the SL client program code can be loaded once by the system and shared among them all. (Not all, of it, but more of it.)

It's better to first duplicate the icon and rename it, and then add " --multiple" to the new one. This way, you won't have to repeat the procedure after every SL client upgrade.

And if your computer is secure enough (gasp), you can also add " --login Melita Magic myinscrutiblepassword", and clicking on that icon will start that avatar. You can make a shortcut icon for each of your alts.

But it's not particularly safe to put your password in clear text anywhere on your computer.

Perhaps Emerald would work without the password, since it saves multiple avatar names and passwords -- though that gets messed up whenever you use a different client.

(necroposting away)

If you use the same viewer make multiple shortcuts/aliases/launch scripts that login each seperately and define a different cache location for each. Otherwise both instances will be trying to put their own stuff in the cache all the time (which is what their code does now, but this would be worse).

It is easier to tell when the month and year is different. I saw November 29 and didn't look at the 2008 until you noted the year part.

I'm going to look for something from December 1 . . oh, 2007.

I also was wondering about the way you answered the question

Yeah, it took me a minute or so before I realized that first date was 2008 and not 2009. the fact that the month/day is within the past few days confuses things more.

Against the ToS

I don't see any issues. That is, I don't see any issues that I don't have when running a single client.

Oh, one issue. When running animations, facial expressions for a given avatar don't appear in all viewers. I don't recall whether one tends to see ones own, or tends not to see ones own, but it might be something like that. I doubt this is a cache issue, since expressions are all built-ins.

I have no problems with stuck grey textures, or textures that are the wrong ones.

What symptoms would you expect from sharing the same cache folder? (Note that the cache indexes are separate, by default.)

A good example is a full cache:

Let's say Process1 says a texture is in the cache. Process2 sees the cache is full so it deletes some textures it does not need anymore .... but that Process1 is still using. Suddenly when Process1 goes to fetch from the cache the file it thought was there is not there. Assuming it handles the condition correctly it needs to redownload it so it deletes some more files and redownloads what it needs. Then Process2 needs files that has been deleted so it deletes some of Process1's stuff and it goes on and on ....

The reason it does not look a lot different than the usual performance (although it is) is because the SL client really messed up the cache code. It redownloads things it should be saving. Essentially, you are relying on a bug ... if LL ever fixes it your client will be in a world of hurt.

In general, 2 processes sharing a resource without some way to keep both from tripping over each other is a surefire way to a major problem. Like if a program clears an area of memory that another program is using ... everything from data loss to a computer crash.

Please do show me the ToS quote that says you are limited to a **certain number** of alts.


In the current ToS (http://secondlife.com/corporate/tos.php), I found this:
"Which does not even totally hold true anymore and does not mention a **specific number**
.

Darn Lil,

You beat me to it.