Second Life V2 Performance & Ports

Honour has been kidnapped and replaced by a pod person, at least temporarily. That's the only explanation for this techie-like blog post.

I had downloaded a new Beta version of V2 last week and was in heaven! The performance was an amazing improvement, even on sims where I typically have incredible lag I was able to move around quickly and the textures rezzed in a very short period of time. I was in love. Then I was forced to download a newer Beta version and the performance was awful. The lag was back and textures took forever to rez (I wish I'd taken a photo. Instead of remaining gray while they rezzed the textures were the login page for the SL website - looked very art deco.).

Last night I saw a link to this post by Tateru Nino and thought I might have a solution. I configured my software and hardware firewalls ages ago to accomodate the ports that Second Life needs - obviously there was a new one I should add.

Luckily (while trying to find the instructions for configuring ZoneAlarm and other software firewalls) I went to the page with the full list of ports you need to include. Imagine my surprise/shock/embarassment when I realized that not only was the new texture download port there but an additional 7 settings had been added since I did my initial configuration. (For those of you with voice problems, many of these settings are directly related to that functionality.)

I managed to configure ZoneAlarm and then I found the web site where I configure my Router settings (sigh) and added all the missing ports. Then I did one other tweak - it occurred to me that I had not checked the settings in V2 that control cache allocation or bandwidth so I fixed both of those as well. And the result of all this geeky fiddling?

Textures now render much faster in the V2 Beta. In fact I went to Alpha Point because it's full of sculpties (which is a pretty good test) and I knew it wasn't in my cache. Took less than 5 seconds for the image above to rez. (happy dance)

In addition, my frame rate at my Linden Home has more than doubled.

All of this is a pointed reminder, to me at least, that some performance issues can be improved on our end too. :)

Now I just have to figure out why my photos are blurry...............