Cool VL Viewer forum

What's wrong with the coolviewer on os x?

Since version 1.23 my fps have been going down with each build.

On cool 1.22 i get 25-30 fps, on the official sl 1.23 i get 25-35 fps.
But on the latests versions of cool i struggle to get above 8fps, with it sticking at 6-7 fps most of the time.

(And yes i did copy the libs for jpg over from the official one.)

Most of the time textures stay grey and sculpties only get their shapes afer many minutes.

The coolsl proces gets stuck at 40-60% on one core, while the official one goes to 100%.

If anyone has any ideas how to fix this, it's more than welcome since i prefer to use cool.

(Macbook pro - 8600 - 4Gigs - osx 1.5.8)

Obviously the symptoms correspond to a bad installation of the KDU library and/or wrapper.

Make sure to install KDU at the right places in the Cool SL Viewer installation directory. I don't know for MacOS X (please, ask Hyang Zhao who is responsible for the building and packaging of the MacOS X releases), but under Linux, there must be two different files, bin/libllkdu.so (which is the wrapper and is 4767Kb big for the Linux v1.23.5 version of the viewer) and lib/libkdu.so (which is the actual KDU library and is 1057Kb big for the Linux v1.23.5 version of the viewer).

Then restart the viewer and pull down the Help -> About floater, then check for the J2C decoder (it must be listed as KDU and not OpenJPEG).

Also, for maximum speed with a multi-core CPU, make sure that Advanced -> Rendering --> Run Multiple Threads is checked.

Thanks for your reply

On OS X there appears to be only one file involved, likllkdu. I compared them all with the official viewer and everything seems to be there. In the about the decoder is listed as KDU, so i don't think the problem lies with this lib.

It very much feels like there has been a high cooperative value set (which there isn't).
Processor stays low, download almost halts (i have a 12Mb connection so no problem there).

As for multiple threads, i prefer not to use that, sl is plenty fast on one core and makes my macbook run at 70C or more, using multiple threads would only make it hotter with not much added speed and leave me with little headroom for other programs. (Which is also a reason why i regularly use sl with a cooperative set at 75 so i can keep it running all day in the background.)

Very strange... There should be Linden Lab's wrapper library (libllkdu) and the KDU library itself (libkdu)...


Check the network bandwidth in the viewer preferences panel, just in case... Also check that your MTU is set appropriately for your network (some ADSL links may need a MTU of 1492 instead of the default 1500 bytes, and using too high a MTU might cause packets loss).

Other than this, I'm clueless... Better asking Hyang Zhao (try IMing her in-world, or let a message on her blog). Under Linux, the Cool SL Viewer is 25% faster than LL's official viewer and 20% faster than Emerald...


No, the additional threads are only used to decode the J2C textures, they won't use all the second core's power, by far, but they do allow a faster FPS by relieving the first core from this burden, especially while rezzing (once everything is rezzed, the multiple threads are not used any more).

I think i solved my problem

I mentioned i use a copy of sl with the cooperative argument set to make it run less hot.
I do this by adding the cooperative in the arguments file, which under osx is specific for each copy of a program.
This has always worked fine, in a way that to change speed i just have to relog on a different copy of the program. (i wish this could be done while running the viewer )

The same setting can be changed in the debug, it's the yieldtime.

For some reason, since coolviewer 1.23, the cooperative setting from the arguments file is copied into the debug setting and saved in another file (no idea which one) which is used by every instance of the program.

Therefor, after running sl once with a cooperative set, it will keep this when sl is relaunched at full speed.

Adding --cooperative -1 to the arguments file for the full speed copy fixes it permantly.