What does that mean?

[MayaDahab]

This message 'Your HUD uses a lot of texture memory. It is likely to negatively affect your performance' appeared to me two days ago. What does that mean?

[Lindal Kidd]

Just what it says.

A HUD is a "Heads Up Display", a set of controls that is attached to one of your screen attach points.  Lots of things use HUDs...animation overriders, controls for mesh bodies, clothing texture appliers, combat systems, vehicle controls, and on and on.

HUDs are actual objects, and as such, they have textures (bitmapped images, i.e. pictures) applied to their surfaces. 

Textures are images, and images can be small (say, a 128 x 128 pixel image) or as large as 1024 x 1024 pixels.  The bigger an image is (not in physical size, but in number of pixels), the more memory it requires of your graphics card in order to be displayed.  This is why, when you go to a new place, some things stay gray longer than others...they have more complex textures and take longer to render.

If the creator of your HUD used a lot of high resolution textures to make the HUD, it can produce this warning message.  You should send an IM or a notecard to the creator of your HUD and suggest that they do a product update with lower resolution textures.

If you have a fast computer and lots of spare disk space, you may be able to get this message to go away by increasing the size of your local cache.  This is done in Me/Preferences/Network and Cache.  Increasing the size of your cache should improve your performance when you go to places you visit often.  The downside is that it will take longer to delete, to move, or to re-populate if you ever need to clear it.