SL Inventory Problem

In machines with limited memory there tend to be more inventory problems because of a crash while the viewer is closing. Latif Khalifa, Singularity & Radegast TPV Dev, explained that as the viewer closes it compresses the inventory list and saves it in the SL cache folders. (Those are the files with names ending in inv.gz.)

I’m not that into what this part of the viewer is doing or how it does it. Hopefully I have this mostly right.

If the system is almost out of free available memory, the task crashes as runs out of memory needed for the compression process. The result is not noticeable until the next login when parts of the inventory are missing. Of course the files can be rebuilt from the SL server and the inventory is not really missing, the viewer just thinks it is. 

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Second Life Login Problem/Fail

Inara Pey made it to the Beta Server meeting I missed due to RL work. In that meeting Monty Linden discussed a login problem some have been encountering. See her article: SL projects news week 8/1: server, viewer and log-in issue PSA.

In the meeting Maestro spoke about login problems a small number of people are running into.

BUG-5130Cannot connect to second life as it comes up with error message saying: cannot connect to simulator. That pretty much says it all, so the additional details are not important.

Whirly Fizzle provided some troubleshooting steps for Purity Davi in that JIRA item. I’ll put them out here where they can be seen by anyone. 

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Second Life’s GMAIL Problems

Honour has an article up on her blog showing some great pictures of Atlantas. But, she titled it: Google Really, Really Hates Second Life. So, what’s with that? The title and writing is because of Google’s adding @im.agni.lindenlab.com to their spam filter. She points to Prim Perfect’s recent article on how to fix Google’s filtering of Linden email headed to you to via a GMAIL address.

The steps to fix the problem are easy but not intuitive. Nor is this a particularly noticeable problem. You may not notice the loss of these emails until you are looking for some specific email.

You can see if you are getting bit by this problem by looking in the left side menu of GMAIL. In the section of the menu with Inbox and Sent Mail you will find MORE. Click it and look for SPAM. Click SPAM and you’ll see the email going there. In SPAM, you will likely find email from: @im.agni.lindenlab.com. If so you need to fix your GMAIL.

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Debugging a Second Life Region’s Lag

I suspect many of us have visited a region and had our FPS (Frames per Second) rate drop to low single digits. Innula Zenovka is managing a region that has the problem and started looking for help figuring out what was wrong with it. I suppose managers like Innula get handed some real messes to deal with.

Innula says her viewer usually runs at about 30 FPS. But, in the problem region it drops to 2 to 3 FPS. I hate it when that happens.

See the thread: Advice, please, on reading consoles and debugging a laggy sim.

There is some good information and tips in the thread.

Ctrl-Alt-Shift-T Read Out
Ctrl-Alt-Shift-T Read Out

One tip is to select an item you think may be using a number of large textures. A simple right click on it will do. Then press Ctrl-Alt-Shift-T. This will send a series of notifications. You will get a list of the textures used in the item as a list ordered by each object in a link set. The notifications tell you the size of the texture and which face it is applied to.

You can see the result in the image: Ctrl-Alt-Shift-T Read Out. 

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Second Life Height Offset

Third party viewer users are accustomed to have the a feature know as avatar z-offset or height offset. This feature allowed us to precisely control our avatars vertical position. Whether walking, sitting, or ground sitting we could adjust the avatar’s vertical position in relation to the ground or a floor.

The roll out of SSA broke this feature. It appears this is the thing most often asked about in various support groups since SSA rolled out. At least it is the question I see most consistently being asked. Well, that and temporary texture upload. But, temporary texture upload has been replaced with Local Textures for some time.

Today I see the Marine Kelly has an article out about a fix for Height Offset. See: RestrainedLove Viewer 2.8.5.3 with Z offset fix. Marine also explains how to use Local textures in her article. 

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