Why is nailing down a prim to free up prim streaming not technically feasible?

Ok,

If it were this easy, I'm sure it would have been done already. However, for my own edification, can anyone put in layman's terms for me the answer to these questions...

Why does SL have to stream every prim and texture every time it get's viewed?

Why can't we nail down non-moving, non-animated prims so that the next time the client tries to draw them, it first checks to see if anything has changed since the last time it tried to draw them and if not, it pulls the data from the local machine instead of re-streaming it?

Wouldn't this allow virtually unlimited prim usage with out worries of bogging down LL's servers and sucking up bandwidth?

It wouldn't be much data to transmit. The local client realizes a prim was nailed down last time it viewed it, it asks the prim if has changed since the last nail down, if it has, the client asks for the stream. If it has not changed, the client passes on the stream and grabs the data locally instead. Less than a packet's worth of data?

Once we have something the way we like it, we could "Nail it down" to get our prim usage back.

Or, an alternative idea...

Maybe LL could update the client once a month with a new list of nail downs and the data associated with them, so that someone coming up on a prim heavy parcel for the first time doesn't get slammed.

Maybe we'd have to wait for the monthly update to get our prim usage back after a nail down. We'd also probably have to wait to unlock something until the very same update.

How many resi's would tolerate a 10 minute download once a month for a much much better experience with richer content?

How many builders would accept the trade off of not being able to mod something for up to 30 days if it meant heavier prim counts per parcel?

I'm sure this isn't feasible, but inquiring minds would like to know why.

Hmm... I don't the idea of nailing them down would speed things up enough to be worth it; you'd have to send a request to check each prim as well as recieving a reply, I doubt that'd be quicker than sending the few details about a prim straight off. You wouldn't get any more prims either, as the sim would still have to do the same calculations on them.

The second idea would mean you're downloading a load of data you're not going to use, it doesn't seem realistic (sitting waiting for ages for a streaming world to load once a month?) and cettainly isn't scalable. Sorry.

What would help though is if linksets were cached as one object and just that checked for updates - at the moment that doesn't seem to be happening.

Also, if we could create instances of objects so that no matter how many copies there are the data describing it is only sent once (like movieclips in Flash) that'd probably help a lot. I've actually been planning a good way to impliment instancing (as far as the way it's used anyway) for a while, once I've ironed out the last few details I'll post a suggestion about it.

This thread has some kinda related discussion:
/13/59/81415/1.html

Thenks for the response AJ, my curiousity has been satiated. *s*