Easy way to make the linux viewer less verbose?

[QbigBall]

Hi folks,

I'm new to SL, but after upgrading nvidias drivers and a little fiddling with the Open-GL config LL's viewer for linux is running quite smoothly on my System.

There's just one drawback. This viewer is extremely verbose, throwing out hundreds and thousands of lines of no real interest, when started from command line, which is significantly reducing its performance, cause the system has to keep track of all that messages flooding the bash.

Of course, easiest solution is to ground that output to /dev/null or launch it directly from the WM (which is pretty much the same), which increases the viewers performance, but then you get no information, in case something really important goes wrong.

Is there a way to tell the viewer to only output information about critical errors instead of every this and that it's just connected to, opened, displayed and so on?

 

Regards!

[Cerise Sorbet]

look for app_settings/logcontrol.xml in the program folder, and you can turn the default logging level down there, with the default-level value near the top. There should be a comment with the acceptable values right above that.

[Ted McGregor]

Afaik there's no parameter or argument to make the output less verbose. Not sure if this is what you're looking for but why not output to a *.txt - file instead of /dev/null ?

 

command > output.txt

or

command >> output.txt in case output.txt already exists.

[QbigBall]

Thanks Cerise!

That was exactly what I was looking for. God - why the heck did they set such a high default level?! Just reduced it to ERROR and tested - this significantly reduces the viewers CPU load.

[Cerise Sorbet]

Should add, that the viewer creates its own llog files, you'll find them stuffed in wherever your chat logs go (urually under ~/.secondlife). If you do run into problems that need more logging, you could re-enable it, do the /dev/null thing, and still have a log that isn't pushed through stdio.

[QbigBall]

The information on how to change the logging level should be included in the README file of the linux version of the viewer.

In many boards around the net you can find people complaining that the linux viewer is laggy, stuttery and extremely slow - and the reason is nothing else but that high default level of logging. Writing up to hundreds of lines a second to the logfile and pushing it through stdio dramatically slows down the viewer.

In my case, just reducing the log level from INFO to ERROR and nulling the stdio-output increased the viewer's performance by at least factor three. Obiously there is a bug in the viewer's code concerning process threading. For testing purposes I turned it back to INFO and hat a closer look at it. Every time a logline is pushed, the graphics engine has a little lag, which adds up to a tremendous slowdown. Instead of multithreading, the main engine obivously waits for the log about what it just did to be output before continuing its process - a thing that must not happen in an engine meant to produce realtime graphics. Without the logging the engine speeds up like hell.

Maybe it's a bug in the sources, maybe something went wrong, when Linden built the binaries - in any case LL should chance that preset value in the linux distribution of the viewer to ERROR by default.

[Cerise Sorbet]

Both error and chat logging are very simple and conservative in these viewers. They do a write and flush for every line they send. I guess they do this to preserve as much as they can when crashes happen, but it's always felt like overkill. Small changes to allow buffering made a huge difference on my old computers, where I/O was a massive bottleneck.