Second Life: How to Fix New Login Problems

In general people having a problem logging in or staying logged in have connection problems. But we have a new problem. It seems AISv3 removed the LIMIT on how many items you can have in a folder. Apparently any limit has not been enforced for some time. So, we are starting to see some inventories accumulate enough items to trigger a problem.

CAMILLA BY POUTE

CAMILLA BY POUTE by ღÐεεღ, on Flickr

As things are now a big flat inventory with thousands of items in a single folder, especially the root folder, is a problem. How fast the computer, network, and region are determines when the problem appears. I don’t know for sure, but logging into an empty region should give one a better chance of getting around the login problem. Hopefully they can stay on long enough to move items into folders.

There used to be a 10k items per single folder limit. But, the server side has not enforced that for some time. Any idea of a limit was recently removed with the implementation of AISv3.

The fix to avoid problems is to put things in subfolders to keep the numbers well below 10,000. Below a 1,000 is even better. Deep nesting is not a problem. It seems the inventory loading process takes folders a chunks of data. If the chunk is too big, there can be a server timeout as the chunk downloads. That can prevent login or cause a connection drop.

The Lab is looking at how to fix this problem. Expect a new project to handle this problem. But, the Lab is not currently working on code for a fix. And, Oz Linden doesn’t know if that fix-project will make it past the INTERESTING projects they are planning on working on. So, we may not see a fix appearing for some time. There just are’t that many people being bitten by this problem. So, it is low priority.

The Fix

Fix is to clear the inventory cache and log into a deserted empty region the move items into folders. Inventory cache and viewer cache are different. You can clear the inventory cache this way:

To delete just your Inventory Cache:

  • Look in: Preferences → Advanced.
  • Do NOT click Clear Cache.
  • Find the cache location, hover your cursor over the field titled: Cache Location.
  • Default Location is: C:\Users\[Win_Login_ID]\AppData\Local\SecondLife\
  • Navigate to that location using Windows Explorer.
  • Find files that end in: .inv.gz and delete, rename, or move them to another folder.
  • Now start the viewer and log into a deserted region; Pooley, Furball, etc.
  • Open inventory and start making folders and moving items into them.
  • If you get logged out, repeat the process including inventory cache clear.

6 thoughts on “Second Life: How to Fix New Login Problems

  1. Ok, I need some clarification please.

    I have zillions of folders from stores, hunt prizes.

    Is that the issue?

    If I have too many in say: Objects?

    [ seriously, what kind of a message does it send to actively make a change that blocks out long time users and then not plan a fix.

    There was no law passed they had to block these users with this change.]

    • The problem comes from having literally thousands of items in a single folder, root or other. A folder in a folder is one item, no matter how many items are in that folder. So, you can have unlimited inventory items. There are rumors of people with a million items… I doubt that more than I believe it. But, there are some people I know and believe that say they have a pretty flat inventory and are over 100,000 items.

      This suggests the computer and connection speed are major factors in whether one runs into the problem and I what count of items per folder.

      If you have no folders in OBJECTS but 50,000 items, you will likely have problems. But, put those 50k items in 20 folders with 2,500 items each and it is likely not a problem.

      They did not make a change that blocks users. They took of the restraints. Even before then they were not enforcing the limits. There is nothing in the SL system that blocks based on inventory count. The problem starts when YOUR viewer takes TOO LONG to respond during login because it is downloading a folder with thousands of items. A slow computer, slow connection, poor connection dropping packets, or an overload region can aggravate the problem.

  2. Ah ok had that time out a lot on low end DSL . Better with fiber but really noticed better inventory access on SL go– I could jump to an item in my list.

    So if I have a lot of say Bare Rose old prim outfits in the folders they were “born” in — it would be better I make a Bare Rose master folder and slide the outfits in that?

    • You have to arrange things so they make sense to you. The idea behind avoiding problems is to get the item count in any one folder low.

      I have in Clothes system folder; Dresses Checked, Dresses Unchecked, Pants, Latex, costumes, tops, swimsuits, and more. In Dresses Checked have categories of clothes; long, short, sexy, evening, mesh and repeat of most categories there, and on and on. Generally my item count per folder is less than 50. My OBJECTS folder tends to get out of control. Often I’ll make a year-month folder and drop stuff in there to clean out OBJECTS.

    • …open it and look… I probably don’t understand what you are asking.

      AFAIK, there is no feature in any viewer that will count the items in a folder. I can do quick estimates of entries-lines of various things shown in viewer, like how many people in a group are logged in. I suppose I would count in the inventory the same way. Open inventory and count how many rows are shown in the panel. At my screen rez and size I have 36 rows showing in my inventory panel. I select the bottom row and click in the panel’s scroll bar to scroll a screen at a time. I can see the scroll bar button in my inventory has moved to the end of the list. Since I selected the bottom row in the previous screen I can see that row is second from the top. So, I didn’t have two full screens of stuff. That means I have (36-2=) 34 new rows showing. 36+34=70 items in my root folder.

      I can check other folders in the root folder to find the folder with the most items by opening and closing the folder. I watch the scroll bar and notice how the scroll button changes size when I open a folder. The smaller the button the more pages of things the folder has. Textures and Outfits are my folders with the most things, Outfits = 205+/-, because they have the smallest scroll bar button.

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