Anyway to speed up loading on certain regions?

As topic.

Does the cache really works? Sometimes I teleport to another place and back, and everything has to be reloaded from the server!

from my observations:

the cache does not work at all.

the longer you stay on, the slower everything loads, until you ... CLEAR CACHE!

Right: the caching algorithm is extremely (and weirdly) aggressive about invalidating old cache entries.

I don't believe there is any setting to make it better, but I think I recall that there is work afoot to change how caching works. It really really needs it. In the meantime, the lesson seems to be to reduce the amount of disk space allocated to cache because the viewer isn't going to use older entries anyway.

On the other hand, if one owns the sim in question, it's easy to make it load quickly. Just use fewer, more versatile textures and minimize the number of different sculpties.

This is really bad then, cause after awhile, SL will take at least a GB in memory, and the extra 400MB cache on hdd (my config)...

... one could argue that the commandline parameter "--purge" might help.

OTOH, on "bad asset server days" that parameter could totally kill your "Second Life Experience".

While shopping and entering busy areas I lower my draw distance right down.

The cache does work, but as people have mentioned, it does not work very well. Everything you download gets saved there temporarily: textures, animations, sound clips, your local inventory copy, etc.

If you visit several places with draw distance turned up moderately high, or that have a lot of people in sight, it does not take long to fill it up. Then it starts to discard data.

Cache is due for an overhaul. Back in 2002 when SL was first developed, PC memory averaged 300MB:

http://www.pcpitstop.com/research/Memory.asp
http://www.pcpitstop.com/research/Memory.asp

And available hard drive space was 25GB:

http://www.pcpitstop.com/research/hdd.asp
http://www.pcpitstop.com/research/hdd.asp

A new budget desktop PC has 10x these values.

So where a cache that goes up to 1GB max may have been OK back then, these days its small compared to the memory and hard drive available.

Well... "does work" for about nine minutes. See .

Given that algorithm, except in extraordinarily texture-rich environments, a large cache is unlikely to do much good.

(I suspect that invalidating cache by age instead of capacity is to get around the once frequent cache corruption problems. If it doesn't load old textures from cache, it doesn't load old corrupted textures from cache.)

hmmm, so what's a good cache size??

I need repeat visits to locations before it starts to draw from cache. My home for example, seems to be mostly cached. But when I repeat visit for example a shop, it doesn't seem to draw from cache untill the third or fourth visit. Textures just seem to take a few download attempts before they're properly recognized on a new visit.

I have never found any benefit from setting cache size to less than the maximum.

That issue is about discarding data from active memory (not clear if its video card memory or RAM from the discussion). Disk cache is another level, which is *not* dumped after 9 minutes, its dumped when it gets too full. Theres a big difference between initial load time after clearing cache and when I return to the same place on another login.

After reading that JIRA issue, I dont see the value of dumping memory after 9 minutes. If your memory is not full, why not just leave it there, instead of forcing it to decode again?.

I don't seem to have cache issues. I have mine set to 1000 mb and I absolutely never ever clear it unless I am having some sort of odd inventory loss issue -- and that has probably only happened 2-4 times in the last 6 months.

I almost always keep my draw distance set to around 128-160 unless I am sight-seeing in a large area. Then I'll turn it up, but reset it later.

Given all of that, it has seemed to me that just in the last couple of days, in many but not all stores, textures seem to be loading slower than a few weeks ago. This is not consistent in all stores, so I have been assuming that it is related to something else going on with those sims.

I'm not so sure the viewer even honors the cache size setting anymore. I have mine set to 500MB; but I discovered, as I was rooting around in my home folder, that my SL cache was taking up over 1.4GB of my hard drive, with 1.2GB of it consisting of WAV files!

Quite right, I forgot about that; sorry for the confusion. Early on in that jira's history, some of us thought it was the cache itself reloading over the net. (Even on a fast machine, the process of decoding from cache and loading into memory is so slow that it can feel like it's reloading from the net, but yeah, that would be even slower.)