Clearing the cache

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Cache articles in the Old Knowledge Base

Stuff to do: This page would love to be extensively revised, including tightening up sections, fact-checking of technical claims, and improved readability.

Second Life uses a cache, which is a software component that stores data on your hard drive for later retrievel. This speeds up your experience because you no longer need to fetch the data once it's been downloaded the first time. Examples of cached data includes object info, textures, and Inventory item names. Similar in concept to a web browser's cache, clearing the Second Life cache is a "refresh" which can help with various problems. While not a cure-all, it is a highly-recommended first step for troubleshooting problems.

A common problem in Second Life is perceived Inventory loss. , a good name for when you search for something you know was in your inventory but has seemingly disappeared. When you experience high packet loss "lag", the cache may be corrupt, meaning that when Second Life tries to fetch data that actually is on the Second Life servers, it's searching for it in your cache, unable to retrieve it.

Further details

Two major areas are impacted by the cache, travel and inventory. Numerous inventory problems are associated with cache corruption and travel can be slowed by it.

Once the cache becomes full it begins a process of "swapping", destroying older downloaded textures to replace with new ones. This process slows rezzing time upon arrival on a sim after teleporting because of the increased work by your computer's hard drive. Clearing the cache can temporarily improve cache performance and rezzing speed.

[avatars] is an indication that the cache may be having problems swapping texture files or other associated transitory inventory problems. Missing or corrupted texture data, often giving the appearance of "macroblocks", and items can also at times be repaired by refreshing the cache.

Note that initial searching of your inventory is slower after refreshing the cache as your inventory is reloaded and cached. Before and after keep a close eye on the number of items in Inventory. If this is not available click the "recent" items tab to view it there. The larger the inventory the more time it will naturally take to reload it. A very large inventory may take several minutes to completely reload.

Multiple viewers

Do not use the same cache folder for all viewers. To avoid confusing the system created separate cache folders on your system for each viewer you use or for multiple accounts on the same computer. This can be done in the cache "browse" section of most viewers. Path in the SL viewer (2.2) is: Me > Preferences > Setup > Browse, button > Make New Folder, button > create a new name in a new location for the folder.

Performance improvements

Increase the cache size to its full 1GB size. This will reduce the intervals needed between cleanings.

Moving the cache to a second hard drive (if available) can slightly increase textures loading during travel as it creates an array of drives that can be used by multi-core processors to load SIM textures. A 15000 rpm hard drive will of course load the textures faster then a 7200 rpm hard drive.

For those with available RAM on their PC. RAMDisk can be used. Perhaps only advanced users should attempt this method of improving cache performance due to advanced software installation and drive configuration concerns.