Disconnected during Intense Disk Activity

[MJArbenz]

I am occasionally being disconnected from SL.  I am typically running only Firestorm when in SL (no other applications active).  The disconnect is always preceded by 1 to 2 minutes of Constant Intense Disk Activity ['CIDA' <grin>].  Occasionally, the CIDA is short enough that I do NOT get disconnected, meaning under a minute.  During this CIDA period, I cannot move in SL, no screen info is updated (chat/radar, etc), I am essentially SL frozen. Typically, as soon as I'm dropped, the CIDA ceases and I am able to close Firestorm, restart it and resume my SL explorations.  The situation does not happen every session, but seems most common when I enter a new area with lots of new textures/objects etc.  My imagination takes me to "the texture cache just filled up and is going through a purge", but I don't know enough about the Firestorm cache to confidently defend this view.  Other than this one thing, my SL experience is great... FPS seem good, response good, I can go hours and even a couple of sessions before the dreaded CIDA strikes, with its possible disconnection. I cannot associate any specific in-world actions (taking pictures, etc) that trigger the CIDA.  I don't recall having the CIDA occur in any other application on my system.  Any thoughts (or associated humorous stories) would be appreciated.

BACKGROUND:  System: i7 cpu, 4GB ram, Gforce GTX 970 4GB, Win7, 64bit.  Network: Direct wired cable modem, speed commonly 20+GB down, 10+GB up to Tucon AZ.  Firestorm: Max bandwidth 1500, Cache size 3072

[Lindal Kidd]

Just speculating here...could you maybe try telling your antivirus software to ignore Firestorm, and most especially the cache?

[Nalates Urriah]

Lindal has a good point, definitely whitelist the program install folder and the cache folder.

Running on just 4GB of memory is a problem. It is the 'recommended' minimum system requirement. I ran on 8 and had those CIDA problems. I run on 32 now and never see them. You do have to run 64-bit software. So, Mac or Win10-64-bit is a must. You didn't say which. Use the Viewer's Help->About... to collect the info we need to answer tech questions.

Before spending money check to see what is up. Windows has a Resource Monitor. Open it up and watch what is happening. You'll see what is using the disk. You won't know why, just who. If it isn't FS, close whatever it is.

There is a free Memory History Tool that will show you how much memory the viewer is using... and other apps. You'll see if you are running out of free memory. Also if the amount FS is using constantly increases, some driver is leaking memory when running FS or FS is when working with that driver. If that is the ase you can try teleporting to a different region. That often frees up memory. For a fix, make sure your drivers are up to date. Other than driver updates there is no user side fix for memory leaks.

Windows also has a Performance Monitor. It is a bit advanced. But, you can Google to lean how to use it. You want to watch for page faults. This is where the computer runs out of memory and writes as much lesser-used-memory to disk as it can. If FS is running out, it is likely trying to write stuff to disk, then finding it needs something a second later that it just wrote and needs to move more to disk to get room for what it needs to pull back... it thrashes around and runs out of time... crash. With 8GB of memory on my old machine I was getting 1 and 3 second freezes. Drove me nuts. Bumping it to 16 solved that.

You can just add memory... skip all the testing... you'll get better performance and it won't hurt... probably solve the problem. With testing you'll know before spending the money. There is plenty on the web to teach you how to snap in memory and how to know what to buy.

Also, with FS turn off the Profile icons in all your chat. That conserves a lot of memory.

[MJArbenz]

Lindal and Nalates, Thank You very much. The Virus scan angle makes a lot of sense to me, so I'll aggressively pursue that!  I'll also study up on the resource/performance monitors, memory usage and driver updates.  I found that I read my specs wrong and actually do have 6GB physical memory, but your case for more memory seems sound. As a point, I am running 64-bit, so I wouldn't have to change anything there if I kicked the RAM up significantly.  Again, thank you... I now have several great directions in which to explore... kinda' like in SL itself <gentle smile>.  Hadn't heard of/noticed "Profile Icons" before... something else to feed my curiosity with.

[Nalates Urriah]

Hope it helps.