here's a way to reduce lag, seriously

Textures are big lag inducers, especially the transparent 'alpha textures' (32 bit targas), now if we had an option, in the preferences perhaps, to only load certain sized textures ('512x512 or below' could be an option with 'all' as another for a simple example) you could presumably reduce your personal lag.

Does this sound like a reasonable option?

With clothing, LL has already limited all textures to 512 and under... it used to be that we could upload huge clothing textures, but I think it's better this way for the most part. To have it as an option under preferences tho, would be cool, but I'd think that people who are concerned about it already limit their own upload sizes.

thats cool that clothing is already limited to 512x512, i didn't realise that! being an artist i sometimes end up uploading textures without first reducing the size and end up with 1024x1024 sized textures, a few of those in a gallery can be ok but I have seen art galleries full of these maxed out sized textures and the result can be major lag. having an option to turn off the huge sizes might make people more sensitive to the size=lag issue.

I'd have to review the code again, since I haven't looked at it in months, but I don't think that the client is informed of the texture size before at least starting the download process. It may not even be until the lowest level of detail is downloaded.

It might in fact be a nice option for many of the people that I know, who spend the vast majority of their SL time engaging in melee combat. They are already setting all graphics options to the lowest in a bid to squeeze every last FPS they can get, and I'd be willing to bet that at least several of them would not care in the least if all textures were blurry while they were fighting (because they only downloaded a low-quality version) if it meant better FPS and ping times.

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I'd LOVE to also know all the low lag areas one can go, to live or visit with reducing lag. Getting in me new rezed home's door, and spending all night doing so, is most tiring, with no energy left for visiting great SL places/events, that is until I can get through me own rezing doorway.. lol

talking about textures...

anyone else notice ground textures changing where the different layers mix?
i`ve had sand turn into grass, part sand turn gray, 2 other ppl have had this and simply fixed with a relog, new client has some bad infuence on some older cards

Builders can also help to reduce lag by reusing textures as much as possible. Many copies of the same texture are much more friendly than a lot of different ones. This includes avoiding making copies of a texture and applying the versions willy-nilly; better to use one copy over and over. Some locations (i.e., stores) can't help it, but it's best to try to use as few textures as possible when you can.

This is very true. Four 512x512 textures have the same number of pixels as one 1024x1024 but take much longer to download (partially due to per-texture overhead, partially due to compression effects), so texture count is at least as important as texture size. And the culling algorithm isn't very smart about hidden and occluded surfaces, so textures applied to buried edges, for example, will still get downloaded even if they've been replaced on all exposed surfaces.

Yes, except a relog doesn't fix it for me .

Im wondering where the info on clothing being limited to 512x512 texture size came from... cuz I'd like to go read about it.

I am curious how they differentiate clothing textures from other textures?

I mean, if I make a basic SL t-shirt, and go to texture it, does it only SHOW 512x512 textures as options and hide all of the larger files?

edit, Ok I went poking around, found a few answers, apparently you can use a larger filesize on your shirt, but SL "bakes" the avatar & clothing and in doing so autosizes all textures to 512x512 regardless of their original size in inventory (at least, according to the last post on this JIRA thread: https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-1119 -- I have no idea I guess if that is accurate...)

Problem here: many designers combine several small textures in one big texture. 16 vendor displays for example, each 256 x 256, combined to 1024 x 1024. The prims display only 1/16 of the image. This doesn't create lag; on the contrary, it helps to avoid it. Only one entry in the asset database needs to be accessed to load 16 vendor textures. The amount of data is smaller too, since you have only one JPEG file header.

You would miss a lot of content if you do without 1024 x 1024 sized textures, since all clever designers combine their textures this way. Complete furry avatars, vehicles etc. all done with a single large texture, with a different offset on each prim.

Last night I was shopping with a friend. We were at some place. It was a lovely build. Beautiful, and so detailed. Image times were crazy, dilation tanked every time someone TP'd in, moving around was a struggle...

Suggest you read this great sticky by Chosen few on the subject.
/109/e6/150360/1.html

not sure if this was covered in the previous sticky or not.

but SL doesn't actually use TGA files at all. for any of it's textures, clothing, building or otherwise. they are convertd to jpg2000 format inside SL servers themselves when displayed, which when you think of the size of an uncompressed 32bit image file, you'll see why. instead of couple hundred K, looking more at a couple of megs if you was downloading TGA's