This has to be a cache problem. And, yeah, the new default texture is bad.

I've been doing some testing, and I've come to two conclusions.

1) the new default loading texture sucks big time and,
2) the cache could really use improvement.

The picture below is in my shop. I was standing in that position when I logged out. I waited 10 seconds and logged right back in, to be greeted with this -- the Second Life client unable to find local copies of the textures it had displayed just 10 seconds previously. It took 45 seconds for them to download again my store to look normal.


Click for Big

I've noticed caching in general seems to have been nerfed quite a bit in 1.7. It goes well beyond just textures. I rarely ever leave my quarter of Indigo, so in theory, I should have the whole place cached, right? Wrong. Every time I log in, I have to wait for about 3/4 of my build to trickle in, one prim at at time. And on occasions when I'm feeling particularly adventurous and I travel as far as, say, the other side of the sim, when I come back I have to wait for the whole place to rez again.

This kind of thing didn't happen prior to 1.7, so I'm assuming either the cache got significantly smaller, or the way it functions has changed dramatically. In any case, it's really annoying, and I wish they'd fix it.

I get exactly the same problem. Every time i log in it's 'Grey-Land' all over again. As if my SL client didn't have a cache of textures on my HD. And i can hear it crunching away as it downloads them all over again. Something isn't working quite right.

I don't think the texture cache works at all and I'm trying to find a way to operationalize this without have to grovel XP file system code. But not trying too hard, because even if I repeatably demonstrate the defect, they'll say that it doesn't exist or they are incapable of diagnosing it (the latter of which I believe).

I have the same slow loading and extremely excessive re-loading of objects and textures just loaded , the slowness of the re-loading greatly increases the undesirability of the new hard edged outlined loading texture.

It wasn't like this before 1.7. It makes for the worst looking SL in my two years here.

Yep,same for me. before 1.7 i used to stand still for maybe 30 seconds, and all was loaded around me. Now,i have to stand still for up to 2.5-3 mins for it all to be loaded. Also same thing when logging out,then straight back in. It's like the textures never have been stored in my cache. It sucks.

-LW

Same here. I have also tried setting Draw Distance to say, 160 - 192, thinking that all the textures witin the FOV would be cached. Does not seem to matter what the Draw Distance setting is, either.

Bottom line, something IS wrong with 1.7 cache system. Whether it is on the LL server side or the client side, I guess LL will have to figure it out.

In the interim, I am filing Bug Report everytime it happens, since it appears to be a serious bug that has developed in the last version patch of 1.7.

agree. have similar results.

I've also found that the very, very last texture to load is the default particle texture, which sometimes loads about a minute after everything else. So even after my shop loads, I have glowing white squares coming off all the lights. And since my AV has a few particles coming from the gadgets on him, they remain pulsating squares for the longest time. Ugly.

I agree, does this on BOTH my computers, both have a gig or more of ram and pleanty of hard drive space, and a cache size of 1 gig. This problem does exsist and needs to be fixed.

I think what you may be seeing here is the texture cache that is held in ram before the harddisk cache is used, if you goto, preferences > adv.graphics you'll see texture cache with an option of small/large try both options and you'll notice a difference in the same session with large showing better retention, pretty much proving that anything out of memory isnt being cached by the disk properly.

Honestly, I knew something was wrong when I put my cache to a ramdisk and noticed an improvement. After a while I noticed it slows down a bit wich I think is due to heavy fragmentation, but is still faster then the harddrive cache. Honestly if I need to put my cache to a ramdisk to get back to 1.6 performance there's DEFINITELY an issue with 1.7's caching system.

I saw that thread and didn't comment on it at the time as I could say why it shouldn't be faster but that disagreed with your data. Now that you note that there are slowdowns I'll explain.

XP has a "system cache" which it uses to buffer recently read blocks of disk in RAM so it doesn't have to go to disk to get them. Typically, XP will use all RAM not in use by other processes to keep the cache in; for read only objects like SL assets, this should be considerably faster than going to disk for them. Under Mac OS X, there is a similar block cache which is (or at least used to be) called the "disk buffer cache".

If the SL cache lookup was working properly, when it got a request to slap a texture on a prim it would say, "oh, I have this locally, I'll just get it from disk" and then asks the disk driver who in turn says "heh, I don't even need to go to disk because I've got that file in my system cache". In the case of a RAM disk, you are adding another software layer (the FAT32 block device driver) to do what the system should already be doing by default.

As I said, it shouldn't be faster on a RAMDisk, but my theory can't compete with your data.

Thank you. Appreciate the information.

I have double checked to insure the Texture Cache is set to Large. (It was.) Set Disk Cache to 1GB, too.

I also have 2.5GB of RAM on board, 256 VRAM card, and 6Mbit direct cable connection via the very latest Motorola modem.

Logged and re-logged a couple of times. A very slight improvement noted. Still have multiple textures, including many LL trees and plants (interesting), along with my textures not loading properly / quickly as with previous client versions.

So, I have to assume some fundamental changes to the cache system were introduced and it is just not performing properly. Hopefully, LL is working on the fix.

Caching sucks and the default grey texture sucks. I hope this gets fixed.

By your theory my RAM should also have ZERO available ram all the time. My slowdowns only really occure after an hour or so of playing SL. By this time the cache is fragmented and full so thats pretty much what I'm attributing the slow downs to. When my cache has been cleared everything is nice and smooth until I've been playing for awhile. This is however, still alot faster then the disk cache.

EDIT: and actually I'm using NTFS, not FAT32

Im not sure if people are seeing the same as mee but i dont see the main bit 1Gb data file getting modified during use of secondlife, if i right click on it and select properties it will give last accessed and modiefied dates/times and these are for me the times at which you logged in, and these will change again when you log off

This is running win xp on ntfs

As you cant diable the disk cache im testing if there is any visible difference between running it at 50Mb over 1Gb obviously there should be alot more cached at 1Gb.

Some objects which are linden may be stored in their static cache, which is probably working as this is probably where all the menu graphics are stored etc, this is 25Mb file located in the main secondlife directory /app_settings/static_data.db2 with the corrosponding index file

I had similar results with slow retrieval of schtuff after it had presumably been "cached". A good place to test this out is texture-saturaland, aka Nomine. I can do it every time.

I'm not usually one to join in on "This update SUCKS" threads, but I have to say...

1.7 sucks.

Yes, there are some nice new features... but LL just plain BROKE some stuff along the way.

I'm not a programmer, but it seems really odd to me that while adding new features they were somehow able to break some of the basic functionality of SL. It hasn't been this crashy for me since the 1.3 days.

I've had the "go to the other side of the sim and back and wait for objects to load again" problem before 1.7 too, so whatever broke in 1.7 didn't make the matters worse for me (not that I'm happy with the current situation).

But at least I like the new default texture. Things looke like Tron before they load

Love your use of Tron imagery, Candide.

In their continuing efforts to improve Second Life and enhance our in-world experience, with trumpets sounding and banners waving, LL leads us boldy...........into the past.

Good one.

Hey, Tron is timeless.

Actually, I find the cache isn't all that bad. It work quite good to me with 256k connection. I can notice the time difference before and after I clear my cache.

And...to add, I think I love the new loading texture. Far better than the old invisible texture while loading in older version. At least now I know what's there, no need to make my guessing while they all still loading.

Everyone who doesn't like the slow loading time and the instant immersion destruction caused by minutes of seeing gray textures with a white outline, please remember to keep filing bug reports on this issue.

To some degree, programming efforts may be directed towards the wheel that squeaks the most.

Remember, you can write up one well written bug report and save the text to a text file, then to file the same report later you can just paste in the text from the saved file into the bug report dialog.

Possibly a keyboard macro program should be brought into play to ease the pain of typing the same bug reports dozens of times a day.