Cleared Cache

[Mianiko]

Hello everyone. I need help. I've wanted to have more fps on SL and someone told me to clear the cache. I did it and now the world and my char are loading extremely slow, barely can see some grey textures and a tiny bit of colours every now and then. I did this on Alchemy viewer. I have high speed wired internet connection, windows 10, rtx 2060, i5 6400, 16gb ram. I've tried everything : low graphics, high bandwith, low populated areas such as my house but, restarting, nothing worked. If i log on Catznip everything is back to normal so i'm pretty sure its only the Alchemy viewer. Thank you in advance.

[Mianiko]

It's ok i made it work

[Alwin Alcott]

10 hours ago, Mianiko said:

someone told me to clear the cache.

don't believe what "someones"say .. you found out it's making things worse.
Never touch your cache unless there are severe problems, just lag isn't one.
FPS is 99% of the time slow because textures surrounding you load slow by their big size or amounts, objects are badly made, or combinations from that by too many hig complexity avatars are around you... and not to forget, higher settings in your prefences than your machine can fluently handle.

About changing viewers .. most will function well if the settings are fitting the powers of your machine, it's often more a kind of expectation and preference what one to use. And on some machines the performance of different viewers are putting less load on the available resources.

Another factor... the connection. Speed tells not everything, also stability will influence your SL experience.

Edited June 15, 2020 by Alwin Alcott

[Profaitchikenz Haiku]

15 hours ago, Alwin Alcott said:

Never touch your cache unless there are severe problems, just lag isn't one.

One point I recently learned, when your cache gets full, textures just don't load. I hadn't appreciated just how much I'd stored flitting around places, and when textures plain refused to load and I saw the cache directory size was greater than the upper limit I had set in the preferences, clearing it was the only option.

Bearing in mind the churn of sims coming and going , there isn't any obvious way to get rid of cached textures that are no longer relevant. Suppose you have regularly visited a full region which then packs in. Those cached textures you've got are now possibly worthless, if none of the other places to go to used the same textures during their builds. Since the region isn't coming back it would be nice to be able to purge them but this isn't an option. Once a certain number of places you visit are no more it's probably a good idea to clear cache and then go around the places you still frequent and re-cache it all.

[Odaks]

1 hour ago, Profaitchikenz Haiku said:

the cache directory size was greater than the upper limit I had set in the preferences, clearing it was the only option.

That's something I didn't know could happen. Surely, the cache will just overwrite the oldest textures, remaining full but always having the latest textures stored? I wouldn't have thought the cache could ever get over-full.

Maybe there is there a difference in the way the various viewers handle the cache? You didn't say which viewer you were using. I use Firestorm all the time. @Whirly Fizzle, could you confirm how Firestorm's cache handles full conditions, please?

[Ardy Lay]

LL's viewer does indeed purge cache when it gets big, as defined by the setting and some fudgery, but it doesn't just go willy-nilly.  Looks like it uses some timestamps in the cache header file to select the assets used least recently then removes 10 to 20 percent or so of those.  I need to clean my glasses.

[Mollymews]

38 minutes ago, Ardy Lay said:

LL's viewer does indeed purge cache when it gets big, as defined by the setting and some fudgery, but it doesn't just go willy-nilly.  Looks like it uses some timestamps in the cache header file to select the assets used least recently then removes 10 to 20 percent or so of those.  I need to clean my glasses.

this is my understanding as well. Altho I am not sure what the exact selection criteria is. What I do notice is that when my cache is full it runs slower. When it does then I will often clear it and start over. But this is mostly because now I have pretty fast fibre internet and unlimited bandwidth.  In earlier times when I was on ADSL and capped bandwidth then I would rarely clear my cache

[Ardy Lay]

3 hours ago, Mollymews said:

this is my understanding as well. Altho I am not sure what the exact selection criteria is. What I do notice is that when my cache is full it runs slower. When it does then I will often clear it and start over. But this is mostly because now I have pretty fast fibre internet and unlimited bandwidth.  In earlier times when I was on ADSL and capped bandwidth then I would rarely clear my cache

Mine rarely gets "full" because I jam that slider all the way to the right and I don't get out much.  Generally, the partial purge the viewer does upon login is enough to carry me through several hours of visitors coming and going.

[Profaitchikenz Haiku]

9 hours ago, Odaks said:

You didn't say which viewer you were using.

This was on CoolVlViewer.

 

4 hours ago, Ardy Lay said:

Generally, the partial purge the viewer does upon login is enough

Now this is interesting, I had no idea such activity occurs, do you know what the criteria for selecting ones to purge might be? I have noticed after crashing that on return the world is often grey despite having been there for long enough to have cached all the textures, it's as if the action of a crash flags up the content within draw distance as being unreliable and needed to be reloaded?

[Ardy Lay]

Seems like the partial purge of least recently used textures occurs when the cache exceeds about 80% of the allocated volume.  I haven’t looked at the relevant code lately and am not sure I remember correctly about that age part.     I recently checked the filesystem after logging out from a long session and again after launching viewer, waiting a couple minutes then closing without logging in.  I also looked at the log file for hints.

Crashing can leave the cache in bad states.  Sometimes I see gray stuff when I log in but it doesn’t usually last more than 20 seconds.  I always forget to check the log.  I don’t notice the crashes I get as they happen when I am logging out.  I keep my draw distance at 64 meters almost all the time.

Sorry, still sleepy.

[Willow Wilder]

On 6/14/2020 at 2:36 PM, Mianiko said:

If i log on Catznip everything is back to normal so i'm pretty sure its only the Alchemy viewer.

Each viewer creates its own cache folder by default, so this is not unexpected.