Question about Eliminating Lag

Is it possible that I've been lagging over the many months due to the fact that I may have accumulated too many prims over all that time and not realize it?

I did do a major maintenance just now (I used to have at least 7,000 items, and now I have 600 or 700 or so), and now we'll see what happens from here.

If too many prims were to blame for the lagging problem, what would you recommend next - a defrag and/or a clearing of the disk/web cache?

I know full well not to take advantage of such freebies and other primmy items in the future.

EDIT: Just logged on briefly, and it seems to run a bit smoother now. And I currently have 654 items in my inventory.

Your inventory is about as small as it gets and won't effect lag that much.Mine is at about 18k plus and i run well.I think others have huge inventories,I would not worry about it.

That problem has nothing to do with inventory' size, one of my alts have 60k items and runs as quickly as my main with 7k

You might like to read this: http://analutetia.com/blog/anatomy-of-lag/

The only performance problem with a big inventory is that it will take longer to open it fully.

But a big inventory is a lot more cumbersome to use, so I try to keep up to date with my weeding!

I allways say that the fewer number of pixels you render, the better your performance will be. That's why reducing the draw distance has the most effect - but you can also reduce the number of particles, don't use local lights, just the sun and moon, don't render animated textures etc. Obviously taken to the extreme of not rendering any pixels at all is self defeating - but it's nothing to do with your inventory - unless you are wearing all those thousands of prims and moving about with them. A very large inventory may take a little more time to load when you log-in - that's all.

I think Torley did a vidTut on the dreaded lag and how to reduce it - you can find it in the Knowledge Base under Support on the SL website.

Just to avoid some terminology confusion in the future, prims and inventory items are two different things. A prim is a primitive graphic object, while many things in your inventory - notecards, landmarks, sounds, animations, etc. have nothing to do with prims (other than the fact that a prim can contain such things in its contents).

On the other hand, you might have a single object in your inventory that would result in hundreds of prims when rezzed. As far as inventory is concerned, it's just one thing and has minimal impact as far the time it takes to open your inventory is concerned. But when you rez it, it could cause significant lag.

I think inventory size doesn't affect lag, but in my experience it does have two effects:

1. A large inventory slows teleports, and it *may* (I'm not sure) reduce their reliability.
2. A large inventory takes longer to load (lately, sometimes VERY long).