Items (the world) Rezzing - Something I don't understand

I just don't really understand this, so perhaps someone could explain?

I stand on my roof, with a 200m view and look all around me.
Give everything time to fully rez (textures etc) and all looks great.

I then TP to a friends house and do the same, and all looks great.

Now, I TP back to my house and look at the same items I was looking at a minute ago and still quite a fair amount of it has to rez again. Not so much the prims, but many have a grey or very low rez look and I have to wait a few seconds for the textues to fully rez again.

With 750MB of Video card memory, a Nice SL cache and 8GB of system memory on my PC, just TP'ing between two locations. Would you not think that all the textures would be there almost instantly?

I know what you mean.....

But there's it isn't just graphics card and memory....it's also connection speed and server performance......other factors can effect lag. My graphics card and memory and connection speed are all top end too......but it doesn't change the fact that at different times of the day.....in different areas......things don't rez in a predictable way.

I try to keep my draw distance low if I'm just bouncing around, that usually helps quicken the rez pace.....but it's still subjective. Sometimes I can stand in one spot and turn 360 degrees and have the same issue.....

There's got to be a techie here who can splane' it in proper terms.....but I know there's many factors that affect perfromance....not just what's on your PC...or mine....or the next persons.

I'm guessing what I don't understand is this.

The prims (dimensions) have already rezzed and the textures have fully rezzed (hence held in your cache)

There must be some (tech speak) data that tells your viewer this is the same item (and texture) that you have just seen, so I don't see why it needs to re-send texture down the line to your PC.

It seems a bit odd as some items are fully rezzed the instant you TP back, whilst other take a while to appear again, and the owner and distance from you, (and what the object is) appear to have no relevance.

I often wonder why we even have a texture cache. It doesn't seem to me like it works they way you imagine it should.

Argent! Argent! This is a good time to explain the shortcomings of the SL cache and lobby for the cache method you prefer.

Sorry, I don't know the details, but evidently SL cache leaves something to be desired, is complicated, and would work better if replaced with a simpler one.

When you TP'd away, all the textures are equally far away, so they're subject to replacement by new textures.

I don't know whether distance is used as a factor when choosing what to discard from cache. Recency of use would be a better guide anyway.

It would be nifty to give the server clues about what stuff you'd most like to see quickly (e.g., owner, distance) when NOT in cache. I think there are a few hints like this already (e.g., if your cursor is over a surface, its texture gets priority, or something like that). Doing them all by distance, closest first, would rock, but I believe it would slow it all down dramatically since the distance sort is a very nontrivial algorithm. (It's one the graphics magic has to do anyway, but that happens on the client, not the server, and I suspect if this were easy, they'd have done it ages ago.)

This is outside my expertise, so take it with a grain of salt. Or three.

Thanks for interesting replies so far.

Do you think a prim has a held value re it's size,texture,position etc etc.

and the moment it's edited, this value changes so it need to be re-rezzed.

But if it's the same value as before, you can just go BLAM and repeat it without worrying

Note: non technical desciption

But you know what I mean, SL changes al the time, but if it's not changed then you can just repeat the item

It would be nice to be able to have frequently cached items stay on the drive, even when you log out.

I spend a lot of time in the same club, and every time I go there, I have to re-DL the place... But the content there, even half of the people, rarely changes.

I suspect the longer I'm with SL, the more time I'll spend in places like that.

Squiiiiid!!

/me waits patiently for the picture of a ferrit battling a squid. Or maybe just eating calamari.

Hey, leave me out of it. I may be very efficient at parsing N-deep trees of image caches, but I am not a Mustelidae-meal.

I that's what already happened isn't it?

When you log out, you still hold all the textures in you SL Cache on your HD don't you?
(kinda one of the reasons I don't understand why any textures in my house need re-rezzing when I log back in)

Some appear instantly in a split second
Others (next to them) appear latter almost as if they are being downloaded from somewhere.
And there seems no logic at all to what does instantly appear and what does not.

in a nutshell: its fucked up and there arent any real plans to address it.

Thanks for the clarification.

That seems the most logical answer so far