SecondLife client (almost) without the memory leaks...

Nicholaz is making a patched version of the 1.17.0 version of the SecondLife client. Eventually his fixes make it to the "official" client, however, he makes his own version available for download as well.

if the Linden-patched version does not work well for you, you might wanna give this one a ride.

I'd like to thank him for this awesome job that he is doing.

(wondering - maybe we should make a campaign to have some donations made to the guy ?)

libsecondlife check-up & some more crash debugging

Today was the time to try out where is the libsecondlife since the last time i played with it..

I quickly checked out the testclient - more commands have been added since the last time I tried, now I can sit on things, touch things, stand up, walk, follow someone else, im, whisper, shout - quite a reasonable set of activities :-)

while testing it I had launched the windlight firstlook client, and I think I figured out why Vint was crashing with the firstlook - looks like I got the same problem on it, with the exception that the debug output is dumped...

So, there are two reasons:

1. close the IM window
   
2. group notice or group chat event (not sure yet)
   

both seem to be related to some packet being unhandled.

Needless to say, that the testclient.exe from the libsecondlife handles everything just great.

Wonder how many crashes are actually caused by the improper network traffic - if many/most - maybe we can have a sanitizing proxy :)

"What did you change ?"

or, If the vacuum cleaner did not help...

Some time ago, Veyron had an interesting article about

Second Life crashes, and how they are caused by excessive heat or insufficient power.

While the article contains very reasonable suggestions, I was not really optimistic it would apply for my case.

I was experiencing relatively random crashes, which seemed to be having the following properties:

• they seemed to be very correlated with the changes in the picture - most of the time they would happen after the camera movements, or after the teleports
  
• static areas with little number of elements had much less of a problem
  
• lot of textures seemed to be something almost fatal..
  

With that in mind, I had tuned down pretty much all the settings, with not so great success...

And all of this time I remembered that for a long time before I did not have any problem whatsoever, maybe 1-2 crashes within a few months (compared to 10-15 within a few hours).

There had to be something changed. I did install various sorts of software on the PC in the meantime, however, it was mostly sound-related, nothing video-related...

And suddenly I remembered... Once, in an attempt to "improve" my SL experience (which was already reasonably good), I bumped the "Graphics card memory" in the Advanced Graphics tab in preferences to something I *thought* would be adequate to my card (read: higher than it was before).

So, putting it back...

And no crashes since then. All the other settings pretty much back to maximum. Woohoo!

Crashes can have many different root causes, so this recipe is by no means universal. However, maybe it helps someone...