"Pulse" / Turning Lag, ImageUpdate spikes

Just wanted to start a thread specifically about this problem, as it seems to be increasingly prevalent amongst myself and other players I associate with.

A more thorough discussion can be found here, and even though that thread is old, it describes the problem almost to a "T", with screenshots.

I've done a bit of diagnosis and tracked the problem potentially to a thrashing of texture loading caused by an overly large texture or set of textures getting into the texture cache, and causing the game to constantly flush and reload the cache to the video card, even once you leave the area with the texture in it (even going very high into the sky, like 4000m).

Anyway, I would appreciate some Linden input at this point, including perhaps some technical discussion about the salient points of the rendering pipeline, so we can help track down the cause of this problem and get it resolved.

On a side note, is there ANY documentation for the various Debug info displays which describes what, exactly, the pipeline stages are, and what they do? I can guess that ImageUpdate does the updating of texture images to video memory, among other things, but confirmation of this, plus a more in-depth treatment of the subject would be an invaluable aid as a diagnostic tool in the hands of knowledgeable users.

In the Mac Dissussion thread, we had the same problem. We think we narrowed down the bug.

Further, the latest preview version (for Windows only) may have fixed it:

1.10.3(2) June 9, 2006
Bug fixes:
Clearing inventory search keeps the current item/folder selected
Receiving or moving inventory no longer expands all folders
Searching under All Items only shows folders containing items searched for, by default
>>>Fixed a performance issue cause by texture paging

If you have windows, try the preview. =)

Unfortunately, they haven't updated the Mac preview so I can test if it fixes this issue or the inventory issues. =(

1.10.3 is scheduled to go live on the main grid on Wed, according to the announcements page...

Ahh.. good. I hope this update fixes the problem.

Anyway, on the side note, any idea about technical documentation for the Debug menu displays?

Any word on this? I am still seeing a lot of this, along with situations where textures (esp particle textures on my av) go to extremely low-rez versions at times, and won't return unless I focus my camera on them. Am I alone in seeing this?