[sldev] Texture caching/bandwidth/performance how to proceed

[Dale Mahalko]

It does not look like anyone has ever tried modifying the client to
allow the local cache to just grow indefinitely.

If unlimited growth of a user's local cache could be tracked, I
generally expect that the cache grows in small spurts when a new area
is visited, but then growth is either flat or slowly linear once the
"hangouts" in the world are established.

These growth spurts will be the largest for a new cache just beginning
to grow...... but for an established user visiting a new area, the
"spurt" might only be a tiny blip since the difference between the new
place and all others will be small.

While LL must store the entire world, the user only needs to store
those very few areas that they visit frequently, plus occasional trips
off into new and unusual areas. So even if unlimited cache growth is
permitted for testing purposes, the local user's asset storage is only
ever going to be a minuscule fraction of LL's asset storage.

Also, generally I would expect the client performance to improve by
disabling the size limiting and garbage collection. If the only task
is inserting new objects into the cache without limit, there is no
need to be doing histograms and so forth to try to find the "oldest"
content to remove.

But of course, I just don't know at what size this local leveling-off
will occur, because no one has tried testing any of this yet.


This all appears to be trivially easy to start testing, since it just
comes down to a few file-delete commands here and there in the source,
plus some size limiter tests. So comment out all the deletion and
garbage collection procedures, and force the limiters to always permit
caching, and we shall see just how big the local cache can grow.

Alas I am not a programmer by trade, so I don't have Visual Studio
installed, nor am I familiar with subversion. But it looks very easy
to do this cache hacking and testing using the existing code, so I may
just have to suffer the steep learning curve of compiling to try it
myself.


I have a brand-new 750 gig SATA drive sitting here, still in the
antistatic bag, that has no particular purpose right now (it'll be a
backup drive eventually). I suppose I could set it up as my unlimited
SL test cache.. :-)

- Scalar Tardis / Dale Mahalko