How do we improve SL Performanc for the long term future

Nope. Note that you can log into SL from any computer and be YOU. When it says "Still downloading clothing", that is from asset servers to your computer, not the other way around.

In the future, your information won't have a specific location.

SL is not a game, and IMHO it is not here to compete with any game. SL is a pioneer project, or you can even call it experiment. It's about adding a 3d platform to existing internet applications (WWW, IM, social platforms, media content hosting, web phones and so on). If you want perfect graphics for gaming buy one of those games that come on 5 DVDs or get a PS2. I prefer the still limited world of SL because it is not a game but an entirely streamed, permament, and thus flexible and dynamic social environment that exists OUTSIDE of our PCs. I can live with its limitations because this is just the beginning of something bigger.

Two words...
Open Source.

Say good bye to the clothing and skin industry then.

you don't think that is how it is going to eventually be?

Keeping in mind the "3D web of the future" idea. There simply is not going to be a central asset server for EVERYBODY.

An 8xxx series Nvidia card? $46 - $560 depending on model.

Asus EN8500GT, DVI 512 MB GeForce 8500 GT PCIe x16 128 Bit

124€ or $180 and that's the cheapest one I could find here.

I never actively look at the sky in SL, so wasting 124€ on something I don't care about just to get the same FPS I had yesterday doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

shouldn't be considering the idea of any additional constraints imposed on content. That seems regressive, where we really need to be progressive.

Thank heavens for those hardware guys who keep bailing us software types out by making it bigger and faster! Now, if only we could get *reliability* under control ...

It's a never ending cycle. As an animator, the limiting factor in what I can do compared to what I wish I could do is the amount of render time per frame and the total amount of time available before the deadline. That struggle is no different today than it was ten years ago. No matter how much faster the hardware gets, or how much more efficient renderers get, I still cram in as much as I can to the point where I'm still sacrificing much of what I want to do (and could do) to the merciless god of deadline. That's a paradigm that will always be true for SL as well, I imagine. We'll always be pushing it to its limits, and always wishing the hardware was that much faster, and what we could achieve was that much cooler. Ten years from now, if SL is still around and has continued to progress, we'll be creating in a much cooler looking world, with better tools, on much better computers, and we'll very likely be every bit as frustrated as we are today. That's human nature. But, if SL remains static, or stops trying to push that boundary forward, that frustration will grow exponentially, and the fact that SL runs better for the average user won't be sufficient salve to keep the creative types from running for greener pastures.

I'm no expert, I been in SL only 12months, but I have an enquiring and probably over anaylising mind, thinking about all the stuff that keeps getting added, and comparing our performance to other platform/games, it seems to me we need to hybrid SL somehow to get the best comprimise of all, currently we are at the quality end of quality vs performance. We have high flexibility and high detail in builds and control over our enviroment but this degrades performance. So I suspect we need to bite the bullet at some time and change before an opposition world turns up with a better compromise and kills us. This will destroy some jobs perhaps but create others. Some people may think we are doing great have great graphics and all they want, but not being game players as well not realise we are rapidly being outpaced in many ways and could end up as a shopping/sex game as far as most of the population see us.
I wonder if we would have been better just to have 100,000 preset textures all cached to our hard drives with new textures submitted to LL for inclusion in updates or just dowloaded as we encounter them. There really must be thousands of identical textures about and 10,000's of thousands that nobody would pick the difference between. Limit people to choose from the 10,000 brick wall textures on file or make them pay $100L to submit it to the list.
Though I guess this hurts current texture artists business models, but maybe the sorting and selling of them would be a resident function instead, charging more as the texture resolution increases.
I mean how big will we let the texture library get and there would be 1000's of textures stored by LL that will never be rezzed again anyway because they are in inventorys of long gone residents.
Perhaps we should go a step further and have 10mx10m flat panels cached. think of it, if most walls and floors were on your harddrive already and we only downloaded the odd sized bits, furniture and avatars, that must be better, you could see most of a new location instantly, most people have large hard drives and they are cheap to buy, it could be set up to add them as it finds them.
Scripting probably has less impact on downloading I suspect, but perhaps even it should call subroutines stored locally on all residents machines too.
Perhaps the Avatar animation engine should be a local seperately updated program in it's own right.
So what are other residents ideas and feelings on how we could improve the engine, maybe LL might get some ideas from this, as we are all in this world together. All issues like camping, megaprims, bugs and even Havok are irelevant this is about the core engine and how it can be improved to make less data travelling along our phone lines to get our performance up so we can have more features. this is about planning for SL to be at the top in 10 years time that people are using it to play WoW style games her in world with similar quality. We seem to be getting slower as we add more features and content, but to not grow is to die, opensource will make many things worse in my view Australians using a sim in Australia will have better performance than other people in the same sims. The more data we need to keep bouncing about the worlds phonelines the worse it will become, and currently we continue to bounce the same data over and over again, then wonder why we have lag.

I think we need ideas for the long term bnefits of the past SL.....

I think Chip hit the nail on the head.

In order for SL to move ahead, the users will have to move ahead. This means dumping the old hardware for the new. Upgrades are pretty cheap nowadays. 1 Gig of DDR2 RAM? $25!! A 200 Gig Hard Drive? $65. An 8xxx series Nvidia card? $46 - $560 depending on model. Forget AGP video cards- its dead and being quickly pushed out. CPU's/Processors? $60-$90 for 2 GHZ Dual Core depending on whether its AMD or Intel.

Running SL on a 5-10 yr old system is like trying to use SL on Dial-Up.

As much as I loved my Commodore 64, I know there's a time for change.

We need longer posts.