09 August, 2010

it's time to let go, it's time to carry on with the show

Sphynx has been telling me for a couple days now--quirkily, the length of time the really bad bugs have shown up for me--that it's a bad idea to keep caches for SL on a temporary drive. Or maybe on a small drive is better.

So, after crashing for the second time, and noticing yet again I couldn't drag anything into a prim (and this after not being able to buy things on several of the hunt stops, earlier) I finally started putting two and two together.

Having asked a question of the talented gentles in the Twisted Thorn group about that same time, Miss Barbara Collazo tossed me a way to sledgehammer caches.

She's not kidding. It really works.

And I'll tell you something else--it works whether you kill and relocate one cache, or--as I had to do--kill and relocate four.

All four caches (for SnowGlobe, CoolVL, Emerald and viewer 2.1, if anyone's curious) are now in a subfolder off C drive. It's not ideal--but nothing's pulling off my 2 gB flash drive, now.

Me? I'm just happy things work again.

Don't mistake me--large inventories still cause lag, and I'm, not begrudging the hour of panic that led me to deleting more than nine thousand inventory items. I need to do more work. There's just way too much stuph out there, one avatar cannot own it all. And an avatar who lives, works and builds? It's far too easy to accumulate mass tons of things.

But never put your SL cache on a small, temporary drive. Trust me. Things go sideways at speed.

2 comments:

Rhianon Jameson said...

Ye gods, a 2 gb flash drive? Yeah, I can see things going wonky very quickly that way. Not to minimize your panic and not to be entirely self-centered, but it's a little reassuring to think that the problem was on your end, not the server end.

But this raises an issue that's irked me for a while: why is it that we users have to come up with hints on how to speed performance, with notes traded furtively amongst us like a high-tech necronomicon?

Yes, I know all this stuff depends on the user's machine, which, at least in the Windows world, can have a near-infinite number of permutations. But I keep reading about tweaks that may have some impact on performance, without having any idea of whether this impact will be noticeable. You'd think LL would have a better understanding of what works and what doesn't, what debug settings will give the biggest bang for the buck (and which will destabilize the system), and so on.

Ah well, probably too much to ask, as there doesn't seem to be anyone left at the Lab, save Phillip and a couple of drinking buddies.

Emilly Orr said...

You're not wrong.

And sadly, this isn't even anything new--the entire concept of third-party browsers came about because a programmer named Nicholaz Beresford sat up one day and thought of all the fixes he'd read about on the programmers' email list, and wondered why none of them were in the official client?

This is just an extension of that, and sadly, I don't think this is likely to change. Because again, the Lindens--however many are left at this point--don't live in their world. They live in secluded enclaves when they come in at all; the rest of the residents are the ones figuring out what works and what doesn't, because we're the ones who have to; something fails to work properly at the Linden level, I get the idea they just upgrade and toss a note to the IT department.

hide away, they say, 'cos we don't want your broken parts

Yeah, so...remember that thing I was recovering from? You know, last year ? Yeah. I did it again. So this is Em Faw Down Go Boom part ...