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 space on your hard drive used for quicker retrieval of inworld content after it's downloaded. 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.

A common problem in Second Life is perceived inventory loss, which is a good term for when you search your inventory for something you recall being there recently, but it doesn't show up. When you experience high packet loss "lag", the cache can be corrupted, meaning that when Second Life goes to look something up that actually is on our servers, it doesn't find it locally on your computer's cached inventory. For additional information see User Datagram Protocol (UDP)

Further details

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

Once the cache becomes full it begins a process of swapping, switching out new textures for old one's this process slows rezzing time upon arrival at a SIM after teleporting. Clearing the cache can temporarily improve cache performance and rezzing speed.

Cloud Avatars is an indication that the cache is having problems swapping texture files or other associated inventory problems. Missing and corrupt texture files and items can also at times be repaired after a cache refresh. "Lost items"? See this link Inventory loss.

Note that initial searching is slower after cache refreshing as your inventory is re-cached, reloaded. 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 take to reload it. Very large inventory might take 'some time" to reload.

Cache refreshing should be done infrequently. Those that travel more will need to refresh it more frequently.

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.