1 large vs. several small textures

I read Chosen Few's excellent sticky about texture sizes above, but there are a couple of things I didn't glean from it, probably lost in the wealth of information there.

The main part of a building I'm making is shaped like an inverted "U" and I want something that looks like one large texture going from one flat face arching over the curve and continuing down the other flat side. The walls are made of about eight prims due to having to accommodate a door. (I'm not concerned at this point with the flat walls capping either end of the 3d "U" shape.) Would one large rectangular texture, say 512 x 1024, or 256 x 512, spread over the eight prims work better as far as video memory than several smaller different textures? Or does it amount to the same thing?

As a secondary question - would the rectangular texture really upload as 512x1024? Can I use a grid texture first on the prims to help line up the big one? If so can a square grid work in this case since the big texture will not be square, or will at least be pasted on as a big curved rectangle?

I hope I'm making sense - I'm struggling to put these simple visual concepts into words. Thanks.

smaller texture with more repeats would be better than bigger

a reused texture is better than a new one (presumably it doesn't retransfer the duplicate)

as a general rule textures that are larger compress better than smaller one (not sure how true this is with jp2), so besides needing seperate heads for transfer, and seperation within memory, 2 files at 512x512 would most likely take more space and more bandwidth than a single file at 1024x512

I can't remember if SL is accepting 1024 or not these days, but if it is, yes you'd get your properly (power of two sides) sized image

yes you could use an alinment texture beforehand (there's one on the forums here that Chosen made, along with the uuid) and should work fine, since it's basis is not shape, but getting accurate offsets for alignment.

This is the answer I was hoping for! Thank you.

Since it's only L$10. I think it's worth it to try the 256 x 512 first to see if that's good enough. It will be a kind of gradient from top to bottom so repeated textures will probably not work. But this is all good news.

believe it or not SL's jp2 implementation seems to be pretty good with gradients (and not to bad with plasmacloud maps either).... it's about the only thing it weems to do well... fuzzy with few artifacts =X