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Is Cool Viewer cache incorrect? 
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Joined: 2009-05-12 20:29:26
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Hi, I thought to solve the problem of slow initial world load times and making it load faster using unused memory that XP 32 bit cant see, as a ramdisk. I have 4 gigs of ram xp only sees 3. The idea is to use PAE plus Ramdisk Plus to access this unused 1 gig of ram and make it a ramdisk with the cool viewer cashe file in it. I thought 1 gig would be perfect because the max size for the cache is 1000 MB. This would also save wear and tear on the hard drive.

But, when I looked at the properties for the cache folder (to copy it to the ramdisk) it has over 2 gigs of data in it.. What happened to the supposed 1 gig limit??

Is 1 gig really a limit of is the cool viewer cache?

If so, is it broken?

Or am I not understanding something about this whole cache limit issue ?

Lots of folks are thinking they only are using 1 gig for cache, when in reality they are gonna find their whole hard drive is being taken up with cool viewer cache! What gives?


2009-05-12 20:45:35
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Joined: 2009-03-17 18:42:51
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John Phoenix wrote:
Hi, I thought to solve the problem of slow initial world load times and making it load faster using unused memory that XP 32 bit cant see, as a ramdisk. I have 4 gigs of ram xp only sees 3. The idea is to use PAE plus Ramdisk Plus to access this unused 1 gig of ram and make it a ramdisk with the cool viewer cashe file in it. I thought 1 gig would be perfect because the max size for the cache is 1000 MB. This would also save wear and tear on the hard drive.
This is a very bad idea... There are two types of caches in the viewer (official viewer and Cool SL Viewer): one on the hard disk, meant to cache stuff over sessions, and one in the memory (organized as a virtual file system) to cache stuff during the session (this virtual file system is also wrote back into the hard disk cache at the end of each session).

So, basically, when SL starts, it first restores the virtual file system (VFS) and uses its hard disk cache to build up the memory cache, then it works with the latter, minimizing the accesses to the hard disk and using the memory instead.

Putting your "hard disk" cache into a RAM disk only means that you loose all caching done over operating system sessions (since anything in a RAM disk is lost at each reset of the computer or even at each restart of the OS), and then forces the viewer to re-download everything from SL, including what it would have otherwise kept on the hard disk and fetched from there must faster than from the network... Beside, there is no speed benefit for using a RAM disk, since almost everything is already cached in the VFS which is already in memory (and even for a texture fetched from the disk cache, the JPEG2000 decoding takes much more time than reading the texture from the hard disk: this is this decoding time that is actually relevant, the hard disk read time being completely negligible when compared to it)...

Quote:
But, when I looked at the properties for the cache folder (to copy it to the ramdisk) it has over 2 gigs of data in it.. What happened to the supposed 1 gig limit??

Is 1 gig really a limit of is the cool viewer cache?
The cache size setting is only an approximation and will represent the size of the textures + saved VFS files + saved inventory cache.

To this, you must add the fact that you may have several VFS and inventory caches saved into the hard disk cache, should you log in with different avatars and/or on different grids...

Beside, the SL viewer cache is pretty messy stuff and badly written: for example, sounds (and other objects) will be cached both in the VFS and temporarily (till the end of the session) on the hard disk, adding to the cache size limit while the viewer is running.

Quote:
If so, is it broken?
The caching mechanism is more or less "broken" (or more exactly messy), but it's not specific to the Cool SL Viewer...

In fact, the Cool SL Viewer works around one of the caching problems of the official viewer: with the latter, should you start two viewer sessions (in --multiple mode) and then close one of them, you "loose" all the UI sounds (which then fail to be played at all in the remaining session): this is because the sounds are cached both into the hard disk cache and into the VFS, but deleted from the hard disk when a session is closed, and unlike other sounds, the viewer fetches the UI sounds from the hard disk instead of the VFS (also meaning that these sounds are re-fetched from the network at each new session)... The Cool SL Viewer therefore keeps the sounds cached on the hard disk over sessions to work around this issue meaning that the sounds will add to the cache size while not counted in the limit, but since you are using a RAM disk this makes no difference (since the RAM disk is wiped off at each OS restart).

Quote:
Or am I not understanding something about this whole cache limit issue ?

Lots of folks are thinking they only are using 1 gig for cache, when in reality they are gonna find their whole hard drive is being taken up with cool viewer cache! What gives?
Well, if you never ever clear your cache and keep visiting new places (where new sounds will be encountered), you could eventually run out of disk space... but it would take years ! My own hard disk cache (with three alts and several grids visited) is 600Mb big for a 256Mb "limit" and I did not clear it for over a month...


2009-05-13 07:56:33
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Ahh really very interesting information on how the SL and Cool Viewer work, Thank You.

I have a comment and another question.

I just want to clarify something FYI.

Henri said,

"Putting your "hard disk" cache into a RAM disk only means that you loose all caching done over operating system sessions (since anything in a RAM disk is lost at each reset of the computer or even at each restart of the OS), and then forces the viewer to re-download everything from SL, including what it would have otherwise kept on the hard disk and fetched from there must faster than from the network..."

This is not the case really if you ever do want to use a Ramdisk for something else. Today's ramdisk tools are better and smarter than those we used back in the DOS days. Ramdisk Plus for instance autosaves an image file at shutdown of the ramdisk data and loads it back into ram as startup. This image file is compressed and loads very fast so you don't really notice any slowdowns to your system. Thus you never lose anything in your ramdisk unless your PC crashes without a proper shutdown. A lot of other ramdisk tools will do this also, a lot of them freeware.

Also whats neat about ramdisk plus and some newer freeware ramdisk tool is they have the ability to use ram that is above the 3 gig level that windows cannot use for its operating system. For instance, I have 4 gigs but my 32 bit OS only sees 3.25 of ram. Using the /PAE switch in boot.ini to 'free up' the .75 (768 MB's) I can then use ramdisk plus to use that 768 Mb. for a ramdisk. Windows will never miss it because It couldn't see or use it anyway for it's own purposes. The beauty of this is I have a nice ramdisk without ever having to touch any ram that windows may want to use for itself, if I don't want to! If you have the 32 bit Win XP and happen to have a lot of physical memory above the windows limit you can have a working ramdisk up tp 64 megabytes of ram with this method. We've come a long way since DOS. LOL

Anyway, I DID try the SL and CV cache in my ramdisk and found probably for the reasons you suggest, that it did not work to speed up second life.

I did however find a tool that does work wonders for second life and other programs. The tool is called eBoostr (That's correct, Not eBooster the second E is supposed to be gone) This tool will greatly speed up any Windows XP system. For me, it almost triples the loading times at startup for second life as well as the loading of textures while in world. I can walk around smoother an faster in SL than I ever could before. This tool was actually made for computers with only 1 to 2 gigabytes of Ram. What it does is observe your application usage and for your most frequently used programs stores a super prefetch file for them in a storage device as a sort of cache. Much like ReadyBoot does for Vista. It can store this data in files much faster than your hard drive for faster retrieval. It can use Flash USB drives, unused system Ram from you main memory, or even an SSD, as well as other storage devices. I am using a 1 gig flash drive for this tool right now and it works great. I plan to start using either a larger flash drive or some of my unused system ram to make this work even faster. It seems the larger your storage device the faster it will retrieve the data. It takes a while to start working because it has to 'learn' which programs you frequently use.

What I did was force it to learn by opening and closing my Cool Viewer and then connecting to SL about 6 times in a row. Each time I noticed all my loading times getting faster and faster. It does not store the actual files themselves and does not move or tamper with the SL or Cool Viewer cache, it just makes it possible to access the files at super fast speeds compared to what your hard drive alone can do. It will pre-cache in this manner and superfetch all SL files and textures. I was simply blown away because I was thinking my next step would have to be an expensive video card upgrade that I cannot afford just now. But this tool makes all the graphics in SL load so much faster, I have a little breathing room.

That being said, can you see any drawbacks to using this type of tool with second life and cool viewer in the long run? You may have to try the trial version yourself before you can answer me.

I am sorry if I came off sounding like a commercial I assure you that was not my intention, just to explain what I was doing and how. I am excited about this because I have tried many things to help out my SL experience and so far this is the only thing that has worked for me and works well.

And it should be noted that I do not have a slow computer. My slowest point is my DSL connection. Here are my specs. Pentium Dual Core 4 at 300 ghz 4 gigabytes of DDR2 DSRAM and a 512 ATI 2600 HD pro video card. DSL is 384 upload and 3 megabit download. If this tool can work wonders for me, it should be able to help anyone out.


2009-05-13 15:26:41
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Joined: 2009-03-17 18:42:51
Posts: 5523
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John Phoenix wrote:
Ahh really very interesting information on how the SL and Cool Viewer work, Thank You.

I have a comment and another question.

I just want to clarify something FYI.

Henri said,

"Putting your "hard disk" cache into a RAM disk only means that you loose all caching done over operating system sessions (since anything in a RAM disk is lost at each reset of the computer or even at each restart of the OS), and then forces the viewer to re-download everything from SL, including what it would have otherwise kept on the hard disk and fetched from there must faster than from the network..."

This is not the case really if you ever do want to use a Ramdisk for something else. Today's ramdisk tools are better and smarter than those we used back in the DOS days. Ramdisk Plus for instance autosaves an image file at shutdown of the ramdisk data and loads it back into ram as startup. This image file is compressed and loads very fast so you don't really notice any slowdowns to your system. Thus you never lose anything in your ramdisk unless your PC crashes without a proper shutdown. A lot of other ramdisk tools will do this also, a lot of them freeware.
Alright, but with modern hard disks, multi-core CPUs and (decent, which won't apply to Windoze) operating systems and their dynamic disk caching mechanism, there is hardly any use for a RAM disk (which still got the drawback of loosing all data in case of a crash of the OS or main power failure).

Quote:
Also whats neat about ramdisk plus and some newer freeware ramdisk tool is they have the ability to use ram that is above the 3 gig level that windows cannot use for its operating system. For instance, I have 4 gigs but my 32 bit OS only sees 3.25 of ram. Using the /PAE switch in boot.ini to 'free up' the .75 (768 MB's) I can then use ramdisk plus to use that 768 Mb. for a ramdisk. Windows will never miss it because It couldn't see or use it anyway for it's own purposes. The beauty of this is I have a nice ramdisk without ever having to touch any ram that windows may want to use for itself, if I don't want to! If you have the 32 bit Win XP and happen to have a lot of physical memory above the windows limit you can have a working ramdisk up tp 64 megabytes of ram with this method. We've come a long way since DOS. LOL
Windoze is not that long a way from DOS, alas... A Linux 32bits kernel can use the PAE and address up to 64Gb or RAM, and Linux uses the free memory as a high performance dynamic cache..

Quote:
Anyway, I DID try the SL and CV cache in my ramdisk and found probably for the reasons you suggest, that it did not work to speed up second life.

I did however find a tool that does work wonders for second life and other programs. The tool is called eBoostr (That's correct, Not eBooster the second E is supposed to be gone) This tool will greatly speed up any Windows XP system. For me, it almost triples the loading times at startup for second life as well as the loading of textures while in world. I can walk around smoother an faster in SL than I ever could before. This tool was actually made for computers with only 1 to 2 gigabytes of Ram. What it does is observe your application usage and for your most frequently used programs stores a super prefetch file for them in a storage device as a sort of cache. Much like ReadyBoot does for Vista. It can store this data in files much faster than your hard drive for faster retrieval. It can use Flash USB drives, unused system Ram from you main memory, or even an SSD, as well as other storage devices. I am using a 1 gig flash drive for this tool right now and it works great. I plan to start using either a larger flash drive or some of my unused system ram to make this work even faster. It seems the larger your storage device the faster it will retrieve the data. It takes a while to start working because it has to 'learn' which programs you frequently use.

What I did was force it to learn by opening and closing my Cool Viewer and then connecting to SL about 6 times in a row. Each time I noticed all my loading times getting faster and faster. It does not store the actual files themselves and does not move or tamper with the SL or Cool Viewer cache, it just makes it possible to access the files at super fast speeds compared to what your hard drive alone can do. It will pre-cache in this manner and superfetch all SL files and textures. I was simply blown away because I was thinking my next step would have to be an expensive video card upgrade that I cannot afford just now. But this tool makes all the graphics in SL load so much faster, I have a little breathing room.
From what I can see from their web site eBoostr is simply a disk cache replacing Windoze's lame one. Again, with Linux, you won't need this.

Quote:
That being said, can you see any drawbacks to using this type of tool with second life and cool viewer in the long run? You may have to try the trial version yourself before you can answer me.

I am sorry if I came off sounding like a commercial I assure you that was not my intention, just to explain what I was doing and how. I am excited about this because I have tried many things to help out my SL experience and so far this is the only thing that has worked for me and works well.

And it should be noted that I do not have a slow computer. My slowest point is my DSL connection. Here are my specs. Pentium Dual Core 4 at 300 ghz 4 gigabytes of DDR2 DSRAM and a 512 ATI 2600 HD pro video card. DSL is 384 upload and 3 megabit download. If this tool can work wonders for me, it should be able to help anyone out.
I cannot reply your question, for I wiped off any Windoze partition from my computers a looooong time ago. If you really want to squeeze the last MHz out of your computer and get the maximum performances out of it, my only advice is: switch to Linux.

Regards,

Henri.


2009-05-13 18:30:04
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Er.. I do have a couple of Linux builds I have Fedora core 10 and Unbuntu (misspelled?) I have messed with them a little and love the whole Linux idea and back story but last time I tried, to get all the needed drivers for my machine I came up against brick walls. If I had another box I would try it again or perhaps just put them on another drive with use for this machine and switch drives as needed. ( I have a few drives laying around) Problem is, I use too much microsoft software and play certain games that won't run on Linux.

O.k. you got me to ask. Whats the difference between how Linux treats Second Life compared to windows as far as speed and loading textures goes?

If your answer is good and I can find the drivers, I may give it another shot <grin>

It is something I have kinda wanted to do it anyway for speed and security. Go ahead Henri, convince me to get off m butt and try it.


2009-05-13 21:33:51
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Joined: 2009-03-17 18:42:51
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John Phoenix wrote:
Er.. I do have a couple of Linux builds I have Fedora core 10 and Unbuntu (misspelled?) I have messed with them a little and love the whole Linux idea and back story but last time I tried, to get all the needed drivers for my machine I came up against brick walls.
That would be very surprising with modern distros... The only exception for which you must download a proprietary driver is the graphic card (don't use the Open Source drivers: they are not fast enough), but both Nvidia and ATI now provide such drivers for all distros and for free.

However, ATI is not the best choice... Nvidia offers much better OpenGL drivers and a higher level of support.

For the distro to install, I'd recommend Ubuntu (very easy to use for a Linux newbie, and got an excellent support from its users and developers community), or Mandriva (also easy to use and significantly faster than Ubuntu for 32bits systems since it is compiled for i586 instead of i386). The tinkerer and power user will prefer Gentoo (the fastest, since it compiles everything from scratch on your computer and you can choose your optimization flags, matching them perfectly to your CPU): however, Gentoo is definitely not for newbies.

Quote:
If I had another box I would try it again or perhaps just put them on another drive with use for this machine and switch drives as needed. ( I have a few drives laying around) Problem is, I use too much microsoft software and play certain games that won't run on Linux.
Simply download and install VirtualBox, and you can build a virtual machine running Windoze under Linux, that will be suitable for most software (not for SL however since OpenGL support in VirtualBox is not yet good enough). There is also Wine, which allows to run many Windoze applications (among which most games) under Linux.

Quote:
O.k. you got me to ask. Whats the difference between how Linux treats Second Life compared to windows as far as speed and loading textures goes?

  • The graphic cards OpenGL support is native under Linux, and much better (with higher frame rates) than under Windoze.
  • You will get native 64Gb RAM support, even for 32bits kernels.
  • You got the choice between 32 or 64bits systems (I yet still recommend using 32bits for now, since there is no speed benefit for core2 CPUs like yours in 64bits mode, and SL is 32bits anyway).
  • Linux is faster than Windoze, and much cleverer when dealing with multi-core CPUs (better load balancing, etc).
  • Linux got a native and fast disk caching.

Quote:
If your answer is good and I can find the drivers, I may give it another shot <grin>

It is something I have kinda wanted to do it anyway for speed and security. Go ahead Henri, convince me to get off m butt and try it.
Yep... With Linux:
  • No hidden backdoor from the NSA or Micro$hit, no spying of your configuration or installed software by Micro$hit.
  • No virus, no spyware
  • Any security hole gets plugged by the community in a matter or hours instead of months for Windoze.


2009-05-13 23:20:51
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Henri,

You did it. I knew you would. I'm getting the latest copy 9.04 of Unbuntu now. I think before perhaps 6 to 8 months ago when I tried to set up Fredora 10 I found everything but the ATI Video drivers. I wish I had a good Nvidia card, I have used then many times in the past and prefer them but this ATI came with the computer and i cannot afford to upgrade just now. My card may be kind of old, it's an ATI 2600 HD Pro with 512 MB of ram, but I will install Unbuntu and try to find the diver again.

You listed enough good reasons why Linux would be better for SL so I'm doing it.

Thanks.


2009-05-14 00:00:11
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John Phoenix wrote:
My card may be kind of old, it's an ATI 2600 HD Pro with 512 MB of ram, but I will install Unbuntu and try to find the diver again.
Here is the driver for your card


2009-05-14 07:20:53
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