[sldev] Inventory Predicament

[Thomas Shikami]

Timeless Prototype wrote:
> My Timeless Prototype avatar is no longer usable, I have missing 
> assets and whenever a friend comes online (regardless of notify 
> option) it locks up the SL viewer for about 5 seconds (ie. absolutely 
> nothing moves on the screen, not even the mouse). With the number of 
> friends I have it's impossible to do anything with this fault. All 
> other applications are fine, even SL voice continues happily whilst 
> this happens.

You probably have the problem described in VWR-4178, there is indeed a 
very inefficient handling of inventory inside the Second Life viewer 
that causes freezing and what not. For online friend notifications, they 
changed the friends list in a way that there are hundrets of 
online/offline notifications each login and with updating inventory it 
takes about half a second each update with 25k+ inventory items. If 
there is really high demand, I'd make a patch that disables the feature 
of updating the display of calling cards for online so inventory updates 
don't happen whenever friends login/logoff which is causing the freezes.
If someone is interested, there's an embeddable sql database available 
with a compatible license to GPL. It's called sqlite and it should be 
able to manage an inventory cache using it much quicker than it's 
implemented inside the viewer itself, also inventory updates should be 
done inside a kind of dedicated worker thread and also be asynchronous. 
Please do, as else my main account would be unusable within some months, 
too.