Filling the SL cache while being away from Computer?

[Finneli Felwitch]

Sometimes my network connection is great, other times it is not. When I want to play Second Life, I log into an area and my viewer begins to download the textures/objects into the cache. This sucks up bandwidth and slows down the computer (again depends on the condition of my network).

I am aware that the surronding areas load faster when the textures/objects are present in the cache. Currently I have just been teleporting around to the various sims that interest me, that I spend the most time in, and I have been filling my cache. Problem is, I would rather be enjoying my time with others in SL instead of working the cache. 

Is there a program (download manager), that would just download a select handful of sims to the cache without having the graphical features that the Viewers have? I would run this program while I am away from the computer/asleep.

I know very little about using Bots (not sure what the TOS says about bots). Could I have a bot Jump from sim to sim, filling the cache while I am away?

[Finneli Felwitch]

Sometimes my network connection is great, other times it is not. When I want to play Second Life, I log into an area and my viewer begins to download the textures/objects into the cache. This sucks up bandwidth and slows down the computer (again depends on the condition of my network).

I am aware that the surronding areas load faster when the textures/objects are present in the cache. Currently I have just been teleporting around to the various sims that interest me, that I spend the most time in, and I have been filling my cache. Problem is, I would rather be enjoying my time with others in SL instead of working the cache. 

Is there a program (download manager), that would just download a select handful of sims to the cache without having the graphical features that the Viewers have? I would run this program while I am away from the computer/asleep.

I know very little about using Bots (not sure what the TOS says about bots). Could I have a bot Jump from sim to sim, filling the cache while I am away?

[Freya Mokusei]

Hmmm. I don't think there is any benefit using SL in this way, let me explain:

Well, the cache is not of infinite size. Typically it is limited to 1Gb, although I've seen viewers that can extend this up to 10Gb. Note that as well as surroundings, many other things are loaded into your cache (friends profile images, nearby people's clothes/attachments, even a list of your inventory contents) - anything that you can see, will be loaded into cache.

My understanding is that assets stored in cache are stored in uncompressed format, where a single 1024x1024 texture could take up as much as 4Mb. A 10Gb (maximum known size) cache can store 2560 of these textures, but a sim can hold well over 100,000 textures just on the rezzed prims - much, much more if you include those worn by avatars. It would be unrealistic to imagine that a cache could contain much more than one or two empty sims (or if those sims have avatars in, it's possible that it will store less than one full sim). Avatars are particularly heavy, able to hold 35 attachments of up to 255 prims, each prim having multiple textures.

Once your cache is 'full' or approaching full (or just whenever the viewer feels like it), older parts will be deleted according to their value. This is an abstract-ish concept (there's a lot of maths behind it) but basically, there's no guarantee that the textures you will want, will be present within your cache.

I would avoid using much concious effort here at all - just enjoy yourself, and let the cache do its thing where it can.