How often do you clear your cache?

Well golly, lolly, would ya look at this; it's ALREADY in JIRA as a suggestion to clear cache automatically upon login.

https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-1300

In the 3.5 years I have cleared my cache once when all my textures became corrupted. I felt like I was on a bad trip.

I have switched PCs once, and I reinstalled once or twice.

Where I think Meade is going with this is that clearing your cache when you are not having any problems is probably likely to do more harm than good. At best, it hurts your load times. At worst, it throws away things you've already downloaded - things that will never, ever change - and makes you download them again, exposing you more to bugs that cause the cache to get corruped..

Frankly, Sindy, I doubt that it would hurt. The leading causes of having to clear cache are almost certainly not bugs. And, if you are CPU or local I/O bound, it could be that fetching data from the grid is just as fast. I've seen speculatetion about that on the SL wiki, in the 'texture cache' writeup.

In general (that is, for any cache, not just sl's) cache clearing takes care of two issues:

-- cache out of sync with server. This could easily happen if the cache update protocol is not reliable (and I wouldn't make it so: reliability costs bits on the wire and processing time both) ... say when you have dropped packets or even if your cpu is busy and not keeping up. This COULD manifest as lost inventory that reappears after the cache is rebuilt.

-- cache corruption. This need not be because of bugs; it might happen if the client aborted in the middle of a write (depending on the cache design), or as a result of rabid virus checkers or ... well almost anything that nails a file that is constantly being updated.

Related note: I rarely use the cache clear button in preferences; it leaves some sort ofremnant of the cache(s) in place. I always delete the secondlife folder in application data, and delete as much of the temp directory (in local settings) as will go.

There is already a debug setting that clears the cache on every startup. I have had it set that way for months - it is just a nice preventitive maintenance setting.

I knew they were smoking something over there at LL.

About clearing the cache, meh, it's just a placebo for the masses. When you clear the cache, areas you frequent will need to reload all textures again. Basically, you just made the game slower for yourself until you've built up your cache again. I suppose clearing the cache will help if you've got a really crappy harddrive and files are getting corrupted left and right.

Not very often.

or if the cache code is broken, which is far more likely than most client errors caused by wildly failed drives. A drive that errored 0.1% of the time would be unusable for any purpose.

Put another way, if it isn't holding consistent and valid data, is it actually a cache? The presence of a "clear cache" command is indicative a software fault and not necessarily its best cure.

Respectfully, Malachi, I disagree. The cache may be working as designed ... just not designed to handle the degree of packet loss, or inadequate client-side hardware. My post is just 3 or so above this.

Put yet another way, if the cache is out of sync with the server and it cannot recognize the inconsistent state, the software is faulty. If the cache is corrupt and the client cannot recognize that, then the software is faulty.

Having to manually clear cache has - as its first cause - code that doesn't work. Instead of blindly falling into invalid states, the code could detect such and void the cache automatically. Better still, it could avoid invalid states in the first place.

You wouldn't expect a browser to delete your bookmarks if you asked to display a malformed page. Yet this sort of graceful failure during input validation isn't expected by SL users for some reason.

I clear my Cache if I am crashing/lagging/having problems.

I usually clear my cache once a week or so, i never used to, but recently have started doing it more often.

and performance was worse, or maybe it was just the game. Last weekend was the best in game it has been in the time I have joined.

BSOD - nothing major? If you are running XP, that was designed from the ground up with memory register protection (although not perfect), that was to allow the core programme to always have memory to use when a programme was misbehaving. Understandibly, with the memory leaks of the SL client, this erodes the available memory and when it won't give any memory back to the OS, the lot crashes (BSOD). Installing 2gb Ram, buys you more time, but also consider shrinking the client window down a couple of times during use, frees up some the the memory registers, although relogging is perfable.

I clear my cache at least 3-4 times a week, and defrag the drive that the SL cache is held. It makes my system run smoother, less HD thrashing and the result is a cooler system. I also run scandisk on my system on average, once a month, to keep a check on bad sectors that may develop The cache (mine is set to 2gb's in the debug menu), holds thousands of files, which defragments rapidly the more you move or TP about SL, when I look at the sector map of the HD during defrag, even a small file is spread over many sectors, meaning that the HD has to thrash hard to load those seqments just to load one texture. Keeping it defraged, means less thrashing and quicker responses.

I've never cleared my cache in over a year of playing. I'm convinced (and logic seems to indicate) that clearing your cache is utterly pointless and without value for pretty much any problem. The only reason it seems to work so often is because it requires a restart of the entire viewer which is in fact a good first step to resolving problems.

*edit: Also, defragging your hard drive is pretty pointless on modern machines assuming you have nice large drives that are under 70% full or so.

I voted for "Only when I crash/have problems" because there was no option that suited me. I never clear my cache, at least not for months.

I only have problems with SL when there is a known server issue. The rest of the time it works fine for me. I've never lost inventory or rezzed items.

Maybe I'm just lucky, maybe keeping my hardware to current spec is the secret. Maybe it's because I don't install trial software or download dodgy software/music/video from filesharing sites.

And as for defragging... I last did it on an ICL mainframe circa 1980 I think....

Erm.... no, in my experience.
1. I lost half my inventory including pretty much every single thing i'd made over a two-month period. Could have cried..... cleared cache and relogged... everything was back.
2. I was badly badly badly ruthed (even my hair eeeek).... cleared cache and relogged ..... came back looking just like me again.

Just my experience obviously, but i'm glad it worked

I do, at times, log in and see that my inventory only reports 15k to 17k items...
(I've got 20k+.) Relogging (without bothering to clear my cache) has, (so far),
always resulted in the rest of my inventory being accounted for.

I only do it when I'm having problems. lately I kept freezing and lagging; uninstalling the program and reinstalling fixed it. Sometimes you have to delete the entire SL folder from....oh god i forgot....after uninstalling. Since I upgraded to newer PC's though, I've had very little lagging/crashing problems.

P.S. The program seemed to have a memory leak....i think....is 256,387k normal in the task manager? lol

1/4th of a GB? That's not bad at all..

With the recent round of reported freezing, I opened Task Manager to see what processes were taking up CPU time, and to make sure some undesireable programme wasn't the cause, in Applications Running, there were always 2 versions of SL running. When things are normal, only one version is running.... is this a clue? Maybe something to do with a Dual Core issue again?

BTW, it is very rare that I suffer a 10th of the issues most report, but of late... SL has degraded even for me.