Configuring SL for minimum resource use?

I'm a musician and my (3 piece) band streams live music into SL. We have 3 computers for the purpose - 2 laptops and a desktop. The desktop computer is not in the same room where we play, but we still use it to log one of our avatars in. My new laptop is a dual core with lots of RAM and great video, etc... but it runs Vista and my audio interface does not have Vista drivers yet.... GRRRR.

So that leaves the second laptop to do the audio streaming, as it runs XP. The problem is that this is an older laptop with only 512MB of RAM, and Intel graphics which aren't even officially supported. It does run SL and we've used it to log an av in. And it does stream the audio - it will do and has done either task reliably. But we are really afraid to try it doing both at the same time, even though we've done both on other more powerful computers.

So my question is: what could we do to run SL very minimally so that we could at least attempt to multitask? We don't care about draw distance or whether the graphics look great from our perspective - only that it can log one of our avs in and start our playing animations so that the audience can see him, without crashing the computer.

Hopefully my audio interface will soon have Vista drivers making all this a moot point, but meantime it would be nice to do our shows without having to borrow a friend's computer to get all our avs in. Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

Go to preferences,

Network
Drag the Maximum Bandwidth slider to about 1/3 from the left

Graphics
Set your draw distance down as low as possible

Graphics Detail
Disable Vertex Shaders
Disable Bumpmapping and Shiny
Disable Ripple Water
Disable Avatar Vertex Program
Normal Avatar Rendering
Sun and Moon Only on Lighting Detail
Terrain Detail Low

Adv. Graphics
Disable Anisotropic Filtering
Disable VBO (Virtex Buffer Objects)

If the above isn't sufficient, contact Eddy Stryker from LibSL, I think he's got some LibSL work that might be very useful for what you're trying to do. Basically, very scaled down bots that log in avatars and start animations. He's done some interesting things with live shows in SL.

Edit:
Even if/when you do get improved hardware to do this, I think there might be something in the LibSL project that would enable you to consolidate all three bandmates onto a single machine, if all you're doing is logging them in and firing up an animation. I'd definately get in touch with these guys.

More stuff

You can also turn off alot of the usual rendering in the SL viewer. ctrl alt d to expose the client and server menus (debug)

Under the Client menu, go to Rendering, Types

I haven't messed with any of those, but I would imagine you should be able to un "x" most or all of them, and enjoy a leaner agent experience. After all, it's not about what you see from your agent's perspective, but what the audience sees.

zk

Yes exactly. And your posts are exactly the kind of info I was looking for, thanks so much!

I think our drummer will be getting his own laptop soon too so this will all be moot, it'll be nice for him to be able to see the audience response while playing too.

In my experience, unchecking things in the Client menu, aren't all sticky, so you have to do them eachtime you login. They are however, if you use the debug menu, but be careful what you set to True/False in there.

This is also key: Make sure that your audio program receives maximum processor priority. That makes a big difference as to whether or not other background programs trip up the streaming. In WinAmp (the only one with which I am familiar), there is a setting that tells it to take top priority over everything else.

Have you considered just running two instances of SL on the newer laptop? I believe there are instructions for doing that in the knowledge base, but if not, I'm sure instructions can be found in the forums.

If you did so, you might also want to get a cheap monitor to connect to the laptop, to make it easier to see both instances of SL at the same time. This assumes your laptop supports a second monitor as an extension of the screen, instead of a duplicate of it. Old CRTs ought to be dirt cheap, even free, since dumps often charge to take them.

Personally, I wouldn't run anything else on a machine doing streaming. I'd even recommend doing it on Linux if you could. People will tolerate interruptions in the animation, but pauses in the music are unacceptable.