does high volume of inventory cause Lag?

[Jamie Czavicevic]

does high volume of inventory Items cause Lag?

[Rolig Loon]

Not in the way you probably mean it.  Your inventory sits in the Linden Lab servers and is copied to your local cache as you login.  Your viewer works off the cache, .As you add new items, they are saved in the servers and instantly added to your cache. 

The times when your cache can cause something like lag are when it's being actively rebuilt.  So if you were to clear your inventory cache, the servers would spend a lot of effort downloading the whole thing again, and other important activity would slow down.  That's one reason why we adivse you to go to a nice quiet region like Smith if you have to clear your cache.  At least there the servers don't have much else to do, so there's nothing to lag.

If you have a huge inventory, the download can take a long time, especially if you have everything in a very few folders.  It's possible for the download to be so slow that it actually times out before it can finish.  If it does that while you are logging in, the login sequence will be incomplete.  You'll only have part of your inventory cache, and you might not have your appearence data or other important things downloaded.  So you'll end up looking like a fluffy cloud and having a lot of things missing from inventory.