Why is everything taking so long to rez?

[Rolig Loon 26,621]

Whatever you do, do NOT clear your cache.  That will not speed up anything and, in fact, will slow things down dramatically for a while.  Your cache stores the textures that you see most often right on your own computer so that it doesn't have to reload them fresh every time you see them.

It's quite normal to experience lag in regions with a lot of people.  Avatars are the single greatest cause of lag in SL.  You can get around that a bit by adjusting the "Max # of non-imposter avatars" slider in Preferences >>> Graphics to a lower value.  I think Firestorm defaults it to 12, which means that it will put all of its effort into rendering the twelve closest avs well and let the others look less detailed.  You should probably also adjust your draw distance to a lower value to cut down on the number of distant things your card has to deal with.

Aside from those changes to your viewer, I suggest taking a hard look at your Internet connection.  Reboot your router and modem to be sure that they are not slowing you down.  Check to be sure that you don't have some busy program running in the background.  Your antivirus program could be overly aggressive, for example.  Some of them insist on checking every single file that your computer downloads -- including every new texture that you see.  I'm not a Mac person, so I don't know what you may have to do to tell your AV to back off, though.

[Rolig Loon 26,621]

Whatever you do, do NOT clear your cache.  That will not speed up anything and, in fact, will slow things down dramatically for a while.  Your cache stores the textures that you see most often right on your own computer so that it doesn't have to reload them fresh every time you see them.

It's quite normal to experience lag in regions with a lot of people.  Avatars are the single greatest cause of lag in SL.  You can get around that a bit by adjusting the "Max # of non-imposter avatars" slider in Preferences >>> Graphics to a lower value.  I think Firestorm defaults it to 12, which means that it will put all of its effort into rendering the twelve closest avs well and let the others look less detailed.  You should probably also adjust your draw distance to a lower value to cut down on the number of distant things your card has to deal with.

Aside from those changes to your viewer, I suggest taking a hard look at your Internet connection.  Reboot your router and modem to be sure that they are not slowing you down.  Check to be sure that you don't have some busy program running in the background.  Your antivirus program could be overly aggressive, for example.  Some of them insist on checking every single file that your computer downloads -- including every new texture that you see.  I'm not a Mac person, so I don't know what you may have to do to tell your AV to back off, though.

[BLUExANGEL 3]

I'm thinking if it was running well before, then it just doesn't slow down suddenly for no reason. If you haven't changed anything in your viewer, then I see no reason to fix it. Perhaps your computer just needs to be optimized. You can clean out the browsing data from whichever browser you use for your sl viewer (and your other browsers as well if so). You the routine. Junk files, histories, and the defragger. Another thing is that I just don't see a reason to have my Avast turned on at all when I'm playing

Another thing is that I just don't see a reason to have my Avast turned on at all when I'm playing sl. I see a noticeable difference. 

One more thing I've noticed that really affects my viewers performance is when my viewer crashes. This includes not exiting out of Firestorm properly. It messes with the settings in my nVidia control Panel and it takes me a long time to get things back to normal again. I have no clue why, because nothing looks different, but it sure runs different.

Anyway, I'm not sure if this advice will help you. If not maybe it will help someone else. Good luck and have a nice day