Slow Texture loading in recent viewers (1.21 and later)

If you just hover the mouse over them without any clicking, do they also load quickly?

In truth, I have heard folks say that textures load when one clicks on the device, and I have heard Linden Lab claim they have programmed it to do so. This has been something of special interest to me because I was the one who first recommended it to Linden Lab some 3 years ago (? I lose track of the time). So I've been hearing this was actually implemented-- but in truth I've never really seen evidence of such. I wonder whether that is working correctly and whether what people are experiencing is mere coincidence of textures popping in.


I've tested this pretty extensively... and I have never seen a texture prioritized because I've clicked on it or hovered over it. If this were actually in place, I would think that textures would click in every time the user focused on an item. I have tried right clicking, left clicking, zooming in so that the item is the center of focus. No difference. So either the UDP situation is preventing quick loading of textures no matter what the focus... or it simply doesn't work or hasn't really been implemented.

One way to test this is to set draw distance to 256 and visit a market with lots and lots of individual textures (Grendels Children comes to mind... or any clothing store or freebie store)... and before textures have a chance to load grid-wide, spend a few minutes right clicking / left clicking on individual vendors (be sure to avoid accidentally buying something LOL). See how many of those textures becomes prioritized. In my tests (and I've done this many times)... there is no evidence that such actually works. What I'm seeing is just textures randomly popping in as they're normally loaded.

Summary: I don't see user-activated prioritizing of textures at all.

Just like I have thoroughly described in the jira ticket.
http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-8503?focusedCommentId=94561&page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels%3Acomment-tabpanel#action_94561

Another issue with textures I am having is when in edit mode, it takes a while when I go to texture an object, or change a texture, for the texture picker box thingee to come up. I have waited as long as 45 seconds - whereas in the past I had an immediate texture picker box thingee come up immediately when I clicked on the window.

Not sure if this was addressed or not as I am on my lunch hour and don't have time to read all the posts. And yes, I am having issues with textures loading also! =) I have a very fast dual processor (not sure on specs cuz I'm at work) with the highest cable upload/download possible ... lots of memory/ram stuffies ... and no issues with my graphics card either ... =D

Wayfinder: I definitely see prioritization of textures I click or focus on.

Possibly in a sufficiently texture-spammed environment this effect is too small to notice.

Try setting your bandwidth down to 50 and teleporting into Extrovirtual... and looking at the Tinies on sale in Wynx's shop.

That one seems to be tracked by http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-9291 .

Once upon a time when I would click on an object it seemed it would come into focus faster.... but that no longer seems to be the case.... at least not in the last several months. What is so weird is that I can wait for a texture to rez...and then just look away for a minute to look at something else...when I go back to looking at the first object, it is no longer rezzed. It is instead just a gray mass. And some textures just cannot seem to make up their mind if they are going to rez or not...instead they just turn into flashing gray prims.

In my case...this did not start happening until I started using the first 1.21 viewer. And I can say that the flashing gray prims have gotten less flashing in this last RC. It used to happen with almost every prim with a script in it....now it only does it once in a while for me.

*nods* I believe the meta-issue jira is right here, its some combination of multiple bugs.

The "click to rezz" workaround just works if your problem is a wrong loading prio. Clicking it gives it highest prio. But if you suffer from some UDP network problem where loading just stalls, and you give the texture highest prio by clicking it, the loading still is stalled...

Just a guess, the real problem could be much more complicated I assume.

But it's certainly not broken for everybody.. Hovering over a gray prim (and hovering is better because some store owners get all paranoid if they see you clicking on everything in sight) still works just fine for me.

How I wish it would for me! I'd love to be able to go shopping again. And to make it worse...when I try to read about the item in the hovertext (since I cannot see what exactly I'm waiting for to rez)...the words do not show up for me ahead of time...I cannot read about an item until it is almost all rezzed.

As it does for me in the situations I needed it up to now. But I respect that other people have problems that look exactly the same but obviously have other causes, so this workaround does not help them at all. Tho these infos could possibly be valuable for debugging it.

I've always accepted that textures load slower in SL than in other online games...but the load times have definitely gotten worse in the 1.2x.xx viewers, so much so that shopping or exploring has become an exercise in patience...and frustration.

I've had newbies on Help Island get disgusted and leave SL forever, before even getting to sample its wonders, solely because of the slow texture load issues.

Let's try something and see if we users can find a pattern that has eluded LL so far. Don't know if there is one... but this is the only way I know of to tell:

Computer type: Quad Core
OS: Windows XP SP3
Internet connection: Cable, 6.5 mbps
Graphics card: Nvidia 9800 GTX 512megs
Texture load performance: very poor
Textures appearing on right click? No
Textures appearing on hover? No

Your turns.

Computer type:
OS:
Internet connection:
Graphics card:
Texture load performance:
Textures appearing on right click?
Textures appearing on hover?

Computer type: Core2Duo
OS: Linux (Ubuntu 8.10)
Internet connection: DSL 16Mbit
Graphics card: GeForce 7950GT (driver 180.22)
Texture load performance: poor when in shops, usable otherwise
Textures appearing on right click? Rather fast texture loading, in about 3-5 seconds
when rubberband selecting 20-30 objects, they all rezz in about 5-10 seconds
Textures appearing on hover? texture rezzing in 3-5 sec, same as right clicking

Edit:
I want to add that we need all participant to use SL version 1.22.5 to get comparable results!
Thanks!

CPU: Intel Core 2 Series Processor (1866 MHz)
Memory: 2045 MB
OS Version: Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 3 (Build 2600)
Graphics Card Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
Graphics Card: GeForce 8600 GTS/PCI/SSE2 Driver 169.61
Internet connection: Cable 100.0 Mbps
Texture load perfromance: very poor
Textures appearing on right click? No
Textures appearing on hover? No

Second Life 1.22.5 (107013) Dec 31 2008 13:30:40 (Second Life Release Candidate)
Second Life Server 1.24.10.106829

Right.. There is a difference - I actually came out and said what I thought and you tried to hide your attack in a wall of text then denied it was an attack. I stand by my original words about you.

This is not overly useful information. You could have the best 'network speeds' within your ISP but if their connection to the rest of the world sucks, it means nothing.

If network problems are suspected, it would be far better to ask people things like if they're using a wireless network at home, if they've powered cycled ALL their network gear lately, what country they're in, what their ISP is and, if they know how, to post ping -t and tracert summaries from when the problem's happening.


A Linden could say for sure but I don't think that's useful information. Either a user expressing interest in something bumps the priority up or it doesn't. It may be that a right-click causes a whole object to get a higher priority and a hover only bumps that specific face but, either way, user interaction does helps or it doesn't.

This thread is supposed to collect constructive technical and - if valuable - emotional conversation about the bug. Emotional in the context of describing how much this bug bothers you. Not emtionally about other forum members.

I'll do my very best to make this happen. But I'm not sure what you are up to here.
Perhaps rethink what you want to achieve in this thread and hopefully you come to another conclusion. Really, I'd very like to see some constructive help and personal opinions from you that are about the bug itself.

This is correct. But as a general info it can make a pattern come visible. If not, it doesn't hurt.



This is true. But it would brake the boundaries of this small survey. Perhaps you want to open another thread for collecting such in-depth details? I would be happy to join there.



As I think Dan Linden already mentioned (and this meets my experiences), we have to cope here with multiple bugs that show the same problem. So it's valuable to see how many users have the first and how many have the other problem.

If it helps or not, it doesn't hurt. Where's your spec?

Did you read his extended rant on the first page of this thread??

That's just not relevant to the bug. Neither his rants, nor yours. I focus on the helpful things in life. I would be happy if you do the same. It would safe lots of energy which is needed to get a grip on this horrible bug. I guess it could be out of the frustration because we seemingly cannot move anything for the bug, but we have to try. I'd be really thankful if we could let the non-bug-related topic be now.
That's meant in general, not just you. I have to brace myself, too...

Why do another post? I think a small survey that doesn't really answer much, like this one, doesn't do anything except give people a false impression that they've helped out somehow. This post here has a good title in the right forum and was started by a Linden - why not use it to actually collect good data? That's just IMO, tho..


Unless he said that hover vs right-click might be the same bug, it's better to keep them separate. The first goal in fixing a bug is to narrow down the reproducable test case. Adding extra details is just noise.


It was one of the first ones posted here but that post got deleted because somebody had to go crying to the Lindens. Kinda funny saying that they're incompetent out of one side of his mouth then calling for protection out of the other. People like that are why forums like Linden Answers was closed and why we almost never see Lindens in the forums any more. Sorry if I have a hard time concealing my disgust.


Exactly the point of my earlier post, which was deleted.

Then obviously this kind of posts don't help anybody, if they get deleted. No matter if it was done righteous or not.

If you think asking more details will help, then ask more details. I think that'd be pretty helpful for the bug. Create some easy question catalogue and I will try to answer it. And if my opinion that this would be too much for this thread, is not true, others will answer as well.

It didn't get deleted because it was worse than anything others said. It got deleted because somebody went crying to the Lindens...


Ok, since networking came up:
- what country are you in and who is your ISP?
- do you use a wireless network at home?
- shut down your computer and power off (actually unplug the power cord) ALL your networking stuff for a minute. Power back up and log in.. Any better?
- do Help->About SL and look for this bit to get your regions IP address, highlighted as "a.b.c.d" below

- do "ping -t a.b.c.d" in a command window, let that run for 5 minutes or so, then press CTRL-C and post the last 5 lines of the output here.
- do "tracert a.b.c.d" and post the result here. Edit out the first 3-4 lines, which may contain personal info

I frequently use 1.19.1 (4) and texture loading is still slow as mud. It's been bad ever since the 1.19 release, honestly. I have only recently started using 1.21.x thanks to the CoolViewer and it's as slow as ever. I haven't used it on my laptop, but on my desktop with an Nvidia 8800GT, and there is still plenty of gray. The texture loading time is still onerous. IIRC, you guys did a first look rendering pipeline in the 1.18 series and that actually seemed to do some good. What happened?