Removal of a Feature?

I've noticed a serious problem with performance since the removal of the Texture cache size feature, my poor system is as follows, self built and maintained over the past 3 years:

1. Pentium IV 2.4Ghz (@ 2.6Ghz),
   
2. 512Mb DDR333 (PC3200)
   
3. Maxtor 120Gb (Storage), IBM 30Gb (OS, documents, music), Seagate 20Gb (From an Xbox, used for swapdisk and personal small files)
   
4. Pioneer 107D 8x DVD-RW Drive
   
5. Realtek 10/100 Network card hooked upto a DG834 ADSL Router (Also connected to my xbox, w00t)
   
6. Audigy SB0090 using kX Sound Drivers (To stop that annoying mic echo bug in SL and to get 6 channels through the Digital DIN) Connected to DTT3500 5.1 speakers and decoder/amp
   
7. Gainward 5900/Ultra Golden Sample (can be overclocked quite high without problem)
   

So what's the problem, I noted other people may notice this too and advised them before to do the same as I do, set texture cache size to small. I may have 512Mb of memory, but SL starts goign into virtual memory when set to large and that just start slowing things right down when uncached textures need to be read that are in vortual memory, turning the camera becomes a freezing up frenzy and the hard drive goes mental.

With the removal of the texture cache size feature, the client now defualts to a large texture cache, I've looked though the config files and can't see a way to lower it.

So eh, annoying, just not for me but for all those people that benefitted from lowering thier cache size before. I mean what the hell, REMOVING features? There wasn't anything wrong with it beforehand!

I noticed this as well. I used to have my texture cache set high (I have 2gb of RAM, but I run with no pagefile), but a few versions ago, SL developed what appears to be a slow memory leak, eating up far too much RAM and crashing. The solution, for me, was to turn the texture cache down, which had very little effect on the game but kept its memory usage in check.

Now, that setting has been removed, and SL runs through a gig of memory usage in no time, causing a crash.

Bumped. This issue was not resolved in the newest update.

Yeah, was a tiny bugfix, but I've found that bringing AGP memory down to 32/64Mb and keeping my draw distance down to minimum is making things more usable for me. Anything that requires less memory usage is good at the moment.

We have not been able to reproduce a memory leak in the office, however I will be sure to run some robust tests with the next version to see if I can find anything. Unfortunately we don't have nearly enough data to cross reference the feature or combination of features that may be causing this.

Also, reducing the "Graphics Card Memory" to 64 MB will have exactly the same effect that selecting "<512 texture cache" option used to. Even though we previously allowed the two settings to be changed separately, with OpenGL all textures are stored in system memory as well as graphics card memory, so changing one setting actually affected the other. 64 MB is what we used for <512 MB systems, and should be sufficient to render Second Life at a reasonable resolution (like 1024x76. If you are running at a higher resolution, I strongly suggest 1 GB of system RAM.

-Steve