?+ [sldev] slviewer on PLAYSTATION3

Dale Mahalko dmahalko at gmail.com
Wed Jan 21 13:59:19 PST 2009


I am not really familiar with the PS3. Modern game consoles that assume a
broadband connection are not very useful for someone like me still
restricted to 40kbit dialup at home.

However, if the PS3 is capped at 256 megs of system memory then you are
almost certainly going to have to do something about the client's VFS asset
cache -- like get rid of it and store all assets as individual files direct
on disk, as is done with the relatively new texture cache system.

The VFS is a severe memory hog that is most likely permanently killing your
memory performance due to virtual memory disk swapping, and there is nothing
you can do about it as designed, short of making the VFS cache allocation so
small that it might as well be disabled completely.

The VFS asset cache is fully memory resident at all times. The
two "index.db2.x.*" and "data.db2.x.*" VFS files on disk are only accessed
during client startup to load it into RAM, and then one time at client
shutdown to dump the VFS cache data back to disk.

In llappviewer.cpp, the "vfs_size" is defined as 20% of whatever the total
client cache setting is, so for a 500 meg client cache it is permanently
burning up 100 meg of your extremely limited system memory.

With only 256 meg of system RAM, no doubt the whole VFS is swapped out all
the time, and every moment the client does something with assets, the system
must swap the VFS to get the data. (Why not just store assets direct on
disk, since it is mostly likely already accessing the disk for every
VFS operation anyway?)

Aside from the 3D rendering issues, this could be another part of your
performance problems. The system could probably manage its limited memory
much more effectively if assets were saved as individual tiny files in
disk-based cache folders.


(The constantly increasing amounts of RAM in desktop machines appears to
allow the existing memory-hogging design of the VFS to be overlooked and
ignored, but this isn't going to work for memory-restricted console and
mobile applications.)

- Scalar Tardis / Dale Mahalko

On Wed, Jan 21, 2009 at 5:26 AM, Kajikawa Jeremy <belxjander at gmail.com>wrote:

> I agree... the only way would be for an independent to actually write
>  a specific application for the platform using the Official SDK and dont
>  bother with the Linux wrapper (256MB is already a squeeze)
>  and that the PS3 itself has such a memory limit makes things quite
> difficult
>  unless the SDK provides support for OpenGL along with other materials,
>
>
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