1.8.1 : Rejoice! Or flee in terror!

Oh, that is absolutely true. I rarely start any other apps while SL is running. Running Outlook while SL is running causes a HUGE slowdown in both SL *and* Outlook. Running something like Photoshop is pretty much out of the question.

The only thing I normally run simultaneously with SL is Yahoo Instant Messenger.

P2

Well if the application isn't actually doing anything, that is if you have PS open, but aren't doing a filter or something, it isn't taking any CPU. Memory is a different matter if you are limited in RAM. PS still has a big chunk of vitual memory locked down. However, Windows will swap in the SL image within a few seconds as you use it, so you might see a lag when you first go into SL, but once you've been running for a short while, SL will have most of the RAM. Once SL has been swapped back in, it pretty much owns the machine till you activate something else, or another process activates itself, such as a mail program checking if you have new mail.

You can get a much better idea of all this by looking at the processes window with CTL ALT DEL to see what processes are using CPU, their memory usage and page faults.

The response did not mean what you thought it meant.

My fps drops to under 10 a lot recently and I don't know why. Besides SL, I am just running Photoshop and 3DSMax in the background along with a several Firefox browser windows.

It's okay, George. We're laughing with you.

I second that. FIX THE CACHE!, please?

Or give me an option to use more of my hard-drive. I got plenty of room.

You start off calling people whiners, choose to rave at them as opposed to inform, and end with a threat to ignore people who flame you. Okay, Phoenix, that's nice.

New users who are experiencing difficulties are likely to come looking for suggestions. If they listen to your way of thinking, they might as well quit wasting their time. We get new players every day. If you're weary of having to repeat what you've said before, then quite simply don't do it. Yell at the people who set the minimum requirements not the people who believed what they read.

I've been waiting over 2 months for the texture issue to be resolved (since 1.7). My system is more than adequate according to your standards. Reading your post (and others of the "it's not SL it's you" variety) leaves me feeling that the texture cache problem isn't being worked on. If so, then it's time for me to stop looking to these forums for signs of progress and problem resolution. Maybe we were just spoiled before as it has been suggested and previous performance levels are not scaleable and will never be restored.

Is what I have now the best I'm going to get? Listening to you, the answer is yes and imo it's not good enough. Do you see how discouraging you are, Phoenix? You and Brad can sigh and shake your heads in disbelief over unrealistic expectations all you want.

Reading posts like Cristiano's gives me pause enough not to give up hope for improvement. Time will tell, I guess.

I am thinking this has to be a mistake.

What kind of idiot would use a 2048 x 2048 texture on anything ... ever?

Personally, I would like to see a dialogue box to pop up everytime you tried uploading anything with a dimension bigger than 1024 that says:

"You have just been ejected from Second Life due to an extremely low IQ and ego related personality problems."

That being said, even 1024 x 1024 is way overkill for almost any application you can think of.

I can't see why having something that large in SL would be needed either.
But I send images to DeviantART.com that are much larger than that. Just because I use them as a printing press and sell art locally.
Thats about the only reason I can think of as to why someone might need a large image on anything.

Neither a nor b are necessarily the case. Many times with software, you will see only a subset of users experiencing certain problems. I did not have any texture problems prior to 1.7 on the same machine - the only change being the SL update. Do the math. I know a wide spectrum of people on a many different machines experiencing nearly identical problems. Sometimes it depends on the sim, or the time of day - but it is happening to a wide enough group of people on disparaite enough machines that it points to a flaw in the cache and texture interest list. Linden Lab has acknowledged as much and are working on a fix for the problems.

Over the past 3 years in SL, there have been times when the texture performance has been affected by a particular update - 1.7 is not the first time this has happened - it is just now the system is suffering under scalability problems at the same time from the increased growth, so the problem is becoming more acute. Also, that stupid grey texture with a white border makes things even worse - I much prefered the transparent one.

Your point about older machines being more likely to experience this problem does also not hold true. It probably has very little to do with the performance of the machine, and more about other factors. Often times it can be newer video cards and machines that experience more problems than older ones. Overall, it seems like there are some major flaws in the cache logic. Why it does not affect users equally, I don't know - but just because it does not certainly does not mean there is not a major problem.



Just because you are not experiencing a problem does not mean you should discount that it is occuring for others, or place the blame on them. I do hope this is a problem that LL will resolve soon, as it is affecting the use of SL for many people, myself included.

Agreed. The sheer number of users and the varying profiles of those users machines and level of technical expertise indicate there is an issue. LL has admitted the interest list problem and is working to fix it. LL has also admitted issues with attaching and TP recently, but stated that the issue was short-lived and fixed rapidly. Given that the one instance of user issues was acknowledged as SL-related, why should I not consider subsequent, similar problems to also be SL-related?

Ditto.

coco

Really? That is odd - I can run Poser, Photoshop, Outlook, and SL simultaneously with no issues at all, along with a web browser and an IM client or two. Now before you say "well that is why you are having texture problems" - I could do all of that before 1.7, and even now, with nothing else running, I sitll have the same problems.

Textures have been messed up since 1.7. That's all there is to it.

coco

I dunno what this proves but I have 5 computers going. And each of them has their own "personality" when it comes to SL.
They all run on the same DSL connection but only two run semi decent.
The fastest computer we have, a Xeon server, can't run SL at all.
Well it can run but only at 5-10 fps maxed.

The Xeon can run several of the highest graphic intensive games out to this day at the same time. It only begins to lag a bit after a lot of action is going on in one of the three games.
But SL? Noo its too much?

Another odd thing, SL works great on an old dual 500mhz processor with half as much ram as the server. And a far outdated Nvidia graphic card @ 64Mb.
That is far under the min-specs for SL.
Yet this one gets about 15-25 fps.

All of these run Windows 2000 pro. So that isn't an issue. (except the two I don't use for SL)

I have never seen anything stranger with computers in my life until SL was installed on them.
Well except there was this one time an old 486 I had years ago that decided to play music out of its butt.
er.. I mean the internal "speaker" which is made for system beeps.
The really strange part is I didn't even have music on the computer.
I hate haunted computers

That's because you use the brains of illegal aliens, hooked up in a devious Matrix-style pod assembly, to boost your processing power.

Or wait... Ano are you on dual processors or something? That's another explanation.

I do have a Pentium D, but even on my previous machine, a P4 laptop with 1 gig of ram, I always had a million programs open at once.

So true....

I think the word you were looking for was "game applications" not "computers". The totally fragile nature of SL is typically indicative of accidental reliance on some undocumented or unspecified feature of a platform. A coarse example would be code with busy-wait timing loops that might work on a system bus that has X capacitance or X+5 capacitance or X+6 but not X+4 or X+7. This is known in the biz as a phase of the moon bug and is typically a royal pain to debug and often results from what I call "accidental programming" where someone gets something to work by trial and error without understanding why it worked or didn't.

Back in the annals of SL, when they were a little more candid, there was a bug that they remarked upon finding something like "we looked at this and couldn't figure out how it ever worked in the first place". This is also symptomatic of accidental programming.

A vaguely related but amusing to geeks story can be found here.

OK I tried to report a bug tonight, and discovered (after I wrote the whole thing) that the bottom of the bug window could not be seen! To click on it to send it! (even with no tool bar)

Toy had me try setting the thing to automatically detect hardware (which I think it does anyway), clear cache, bet out, and try again. So I did, BUT now the whole thing froze up and stopped responding.

So I turned off the computer and got back in, without having it try to detect anything, and now the icons were missing. So I got out and back in and the icons were there.

But still - for some reason - I can't see the bottom of the bug report, and I know I used to be able to.

Anyway - the bug I'm trying to report is this - that I don't think they have fixed what they said they were fixing.

I clicked on a pice of my build, to fix it's bottom part to clear, and stretched it out so I could, and it stayed there, and I fixed it. Cool.

The other piece like it, though, I tried it again, and it wouldn't - it would snap back after I stretched it in "edit linked part" mode.

Isn't this what was supposed to be fixed?

And if so, it isn't, and I can't tell them, so would somebody try it and tell them?

coco

There is a certain sort of irony in a bugged bug report window.

Same for me, on my older machine with only 512mb, SL runs lots of other programs at the same time.

Only "issue" is that it is much nicer running it in a window, when run fullscreen it takes time to switch from one application to the other.

I multi tasked with 512, too. I had upped my memory to 1.5 Gb based on all the accolades for increased memory without noticing any improvement in SL prior to 1.7. It's taken too much time fussing over it having diligently read and tried all the remedies for what must be wrong on my end. The only thing left to try is hopping on one foot while I empty the cache, singing lullabies and pouring chicken soup on the keyboard. I hear that helps.

Sean Martin's post about the 5 computers is a classic and should be posted on the walls at LL.

I haven't noticed any problems yet. But I haven't really gone anywhre that wasn't cached or low-lag anyway.