Crash, Cache, and c-c-c-c-

-alamity

I crash a lot in SL, and for some reason, more in DE than in the other sims I visit. Peculiarly, the crashes occur not while I am moving around, but after I have settled down and am just typing either local chat or IM's. That's bad news for RP's, and since DE is so based around static positions and long elaborate sentences maybe that's why I crash there more than in other sims. Can't do much to change that.

What I have noticed when I re-log after such a "Ping! You have been logged out of ..." is that all the textures around me have to be reloaded. Why weren't they held in the cache? Likewise all my clothing has to be downloaded again. (Does Linden's code force-clear the cache as some sort of theft-prevention measure ?)

I've tried playing around with various settings; dropped the network bandwidth to 200K (yes, it's rural England, the squirrels pass the packets of data from tree to tree); set the main cache to the maximum 1G, and tried increasing the texture cache setting on the graphics advanced tab (which always resets to 256, so I assume you can't go beyond what your graphics card has onboard).

Finally, I tried clearing the cache and relogging several times, and what I have noticed is that even on a normal exit, (quitting of my own freewill), when I log back in, all the textures seem to take their time to reload. As far as I can see, the cache doesn't preserve textures across a logout, it just allows you to skip around between several sims when you are logged in without having to reload the textures when you return to somewhere you have previously visited.

Because of the low speed of my ADSL line I want to cache as much as possible to avoid reloading textures. On my laptop, using half the cache figure, I still see most of the textures around me reloading as I log back in again, so I can't see that a reduced cache file with faster indexing actually makes a difference..

What do other people do with the sliders? In particular, what do people who don't see the problems that I do set their cache and bandwidth sliders to?

(Steph L did point out that my logouts were probably due to my ISP throttling my bandwidth, which they, of course, insist they would never do. But since the logoffs occur when I am stationary and all textures have apparently finished downloading, I have a theory that they move less-active streams to the back of a queue in a sort of predictive chunking. It's OK for streaming media with plenty of buffereing in the client, but for SL which needs keep-alive pings it is disastrous. But again, as with the cache issue, it's just my guess as to what is happening.)