Benchmarking Viewer 2

Watching textures load
Originally uploaded by Milla Janick

Viewer 2 brought HTTP textures to the viewer, and presumably improved performance with it. Curious to see just how much better, I decided to run some texture benchmarks So here's the plan, start with a clear cache and time how long it takes a scene to load. The timing was started when the world became visible on login, and ended when the activity in the texture console stopped. I started running the tests at J Peace Island, home of The Mother Road. It's a very texture heavy region that's also fairly quite. It would give the rendering pipeline a workout and low chances of avatars dropping in on me and altering the results.

The results were interesting. With Viewer 2.1.1, UDP was actually faster, HTTP taking about two minutes to fully load the scene, UDP about a minute and a half. This appears to be resolved in the 2.2 Development viewer which renders textures incredibly quickly. 2.2 is by far the fastest viewer at loading and rendering textures.

Other questions arose while I was doing this. How does 1.23 stack up? Terribly. 2.1.1 and 2.2 are much faster on every system I tried them on, and the margin isn't even close. Even on older systems, Viewer 2's texture rezzing performance is much faster than any previous viewer.

The second question was llkdu vs. openjpeg. They're the bits that decode the jpeg2000 files Second Life uses for all its textures. Conventional wisdom is llkdu is faster. TPV developers and users have taken advantage of this by copying the llkdu file from an installation of the Linden Viewer to speed up rendering. Word is Linden Lab is going to crack down on this practice and prohibit TPVs from using llkdu. Let the wailing and gnashing of teeth commence! Linden Lab is trying to kill TPVs! It is the end of days!

Is it really? KirstenLee Cinquetti has released an llkdu free version of her viewer, and it's fast. Really fast. It's easy to compare llkdu and openjpeg performance simply by removing the llkdu file from the viewer's directory. On reasonably fast systems openjpeg renders just as fast as llkdu. Even on old, slow systems like my old Pentium 4 the difference is marginal with llkdu having an advantage of maybe 10%.

My conclusion? Newer is better. The 2.2 development viewer is incredibly fast at loading and rezzing textures, even on very old computers. This is great news for anyone who hates lag.

So Long, Second Life Forums

The Vanity Pics Thread Today
Originally uploaded by Milla Janick

I've finally had it with the Official Second Life forums. I've put up with the stupid reindeer games of the people there long enough. The twatbadgers who get their kicks out of using the abuse reporting function as a griefing tool can have the place. I'd also like to give the Linden Lab moderators a big shout out for making it an effective griefing tool.

I really don't see much point in contributing to a forum where someone can AR anyone out of spite and get a whole thread deleted. The regular suspects all point fingers at each other, denying and accusing, then finally someone brings in a sockpuppet to take the fall with an implausible explanation. Who is doing it really isn't as important as the fact they continue to do it, and Linden Lab keeps letting them get away with it.

Thanks to all of you who helped ruin it. You know who you are. Go fuck yourselves. Good luck to the decent people who still think it's a good idea to stick it out there.