Cool VL Viewer forum

My inventory has gotten so large to the point where it's negatively impacting performance on my older computer. If I delete that huge .inv.gz inventory cache file, I'm okay for a while right after logging in but eventually as LL pushes the inventory back, my memory usage climbs and performance bogs down. Sometimes just flat-out crashing. This issue isn't limited to Cool VL; it happens with all other viewers I've tried except text-only viewers with limited inventory support.

When I don't delete the .inv.gz file before logging in, the viewer oftentimes will hang on the login attempt, so I've gotten in the habit of always going into that folder and killing the file. That's much faster than doing an entire cache clear. I suspect this issue stems from the viewer attempting to tell the server what it thinks my inventory should be. It'd be nice if there was a way to tell Cool VL to skip that part during the login sequence?

Once I log in, I usually don't need to have my full inventory loaded. Is it possible to have Cool VL not load my entire inventory, excepting only those folders I happen to click on? I see there is already the feature where if your inventory is not fully loaded, if you click on a folder, Cool VL alters the inventory loading sequence and ask the servers for that folder's contents right away. I could do with Cool VL only doing those folders I ask for, unless and until I click some other button that asks LL for all of it.

The inventory list (the *.inv.gz file only contains the compressed list of inventory items, not the inventory itself) *needs* to load to rez your avatar's clothing and attachments... It's simply impossible to prevent the inventory list to load.

I'm however extremely surprised that the inventory can be an issue at all (it would require either millions of items, or a very very old computer with very very little RAM)...

I'd suggest you make some inventory cleanup; a good way to do this is to put rarely (if ever) used items into container prims (i.e. to box those items), and then to take back those prims/boxes (named like the folder name the items used to be held inside) into your inventory: this way, the items still exist in LL's inventory database (and you can unbox them any time should you need them some day), but don't appear any more in your inventory list (but for the single prims containing the items).

Hi, Henri, thanks for responding so quickly. I thought I had put this in the correct forum for feature requests?



Respecfully, I know this isn't true, because Metabolt, the text-only viewer I run frequently, never fetches my entire inventory list from the server until I tell it to. It normally only fetches folders one at a time as I click on them. My avie rezzes for other viewers just fine, regardless of whether I've asked for the folder(s) with the items I'm wearing.

If you're referring to being able to see myself, within the viewer, I do understand this. I'm sorry I wasn't overly specific about my idea for how this could work. Yes, Cool VL will have to at least automatically fetch the items that make up my current avie. I can tell that under normal circumstances, already either the viewer code or the server end has it set up to populate what I'm wearing first. I see those folders fill up, and poof I'm not a glowy ball anymore. But there's still thousands of items still being fetched from the server that I don't think I really need to see right then...

Well, it used to. Up until a few days ago that's how it worked, but suddenly, with no changes on my end, that stopped working as it did before, and now my current outfit no longer has automatic priority in the load sequence. I was going to post about that if the situation didn't fix itself after LL's next round of rolling restarts.



2009 AMD-based laptop, 3 gigs of RAM. 280,000 items in my inventory. Cool VL will use about 1.8 gigs of RAM when my inventory is fully loaded, this with mostly minimal graphics settings.



Yes, I'm trying to do this, but the process is extremely time-consuming. Rez empty box. Make sure box is named correctly. Drag items into box, at most a screenful at a time. I can't drag more than that; I'm guaranteed to have items get lost with "can't create requested inventory" errors or the like. Sit and wait a significant time for the box to refresh itself and show me its new contents so I can manually make sure everything actually transferred and there was nothing silently dropped. Pick up box. Move box to appropriate subfolder. It takes a long time. I might be finished sometime in 2020. I'm not making much progress, with the new inventory frequently coming in.

Maybe I could request a new function for inventory folders, right-click a folder and choose a "pack this folder into a box" option? A program could automate a lot of that tedious stuff; it would need to do the job of absolutely verifying everything transferred.

And I moved the topic here, because it's not going to involve a feature change.

Respectfully, I've been learning, changing and improving the viewer code for 8 years... I do think I know pretty well what I'm speaking about... The old viewers behaviour of loading inventory folders listing only when in use has been long deprecated (including in LL's viewer), due to the new (lame) "current outfit folder" (COF) concept, to how inventory links are implemented, to the new AISv3 protocol, and even to TPV-only features (RestrainedLove, to name it, and because of the latter (backported since RLV v1.0 to the Cool VL Viewer), the Cool VL Viewer has been the very first viewer to implement background inventory list fetching). So it's not "just" about the initial outfit, it's a broader issue, and no, there is no way back to the old behaviour short of breaking many features and having 99% of the users complaining about the breakages.

Like I explained above, LL has been changing the way the inventory is working (AISv3), including on server side, so to make inventory operations more reliable (since the server-side baking system now relies on the said inventory operations, such as links creation in the COF)... This said, nothing changed viewer side or, AFAIK, server side in the "last few days" (and I very much doubt Lindens changed anything on the servers between the 25th of December and the 5th of January, for obvious calendar reasons). So, I'd say that you are the victim of a placebo effect and of a misunderstanding about what your actual problem is (see below).

Your issue has therefore nothing to do with your inventory (even if 280000 items is quite large an inventory)... It's all about your 3Gb of RAM: it's simply largely insufficient for today's SL with a graphical viewer (any graphical viewer). 3Gb of RAM means that, since your OS must reserve privileged address space for itself, only 2Gb (at best: i.e. when the OS is well configured) will be available for the applications (such as the viewer); this is called the "memory split". 2Gb is totally insufficient to render today's SL with today's viewers (mind you, features such as mesh and materials have largely taxed the memory usage, and the contents creators did not help, prone as they are to use over-sized textures on over-detailed mesh models). Of course, a smaller inventory would help you hitting the memory limit a bit later in the session, but you would still hit it anyway, so your problem is not an inventory problem, but simply the fact that your computer is no more on par with the minimum hardware requirements to run a SL viewer.

For your info, the Cool VL Viewer is probably the graphical viewer which uses the less memory per inventory item, because I specifically optimized memory usage for it (with my small 15000 items inventory, I got a 20Mb gain after the optimizations, so it would scale to around 300Mb gain for your inventory).