Who has never pested because of that endless content loading? What is the cause, and how to remedy? There is no ideal solution, but a bit of explaination and a solution for the luckiest one is still good.
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| My face when I get that blocking window |
The problem is known
In fact, it has been reported many times on bugtrackers, on viewer (Firestorm) and server (Opensim) sides. I have spent some time reading issues reported to OpenSim. Three of them are interesting, because heavily commented, tested and guessing causes:
- 0007904: Slow Object CONTENTS loading blocks building
- 0008202: Edit object to edit contents i.e. scripts does not load or loads after LONG waiting time
- 0008391: Object Contents failing to load promptly
Why it does that?
The reasons of Why and When are not really clear, at least not totally. One main point though, is that the protocol used between the viewer and the server is slow by design. It's not an asset access problem, so it's not grid related, not a Robust limit. Object inventory content is delivered from the simulator the object is rezzed on. As such, it's all in the simulator memory and/or cache.
A personal test showed me that a script has an instant access to object inventory content, showing that items are available quilcky from the server itself (this is one reason I made the MyBox tool). So the problem is more on the way the viewer and the simulator exchange those datas, and they do it wrong. A good analogy stated in one comment from beqjanus (FS developer) is :
It reminds me of my young son cleaning up his lego blocks. Picking them up one at a time and walking over to the box, placing it in and walking back to pick up the next.
The problem is this one: instead of getting the list in one row, the viewer asks for items in sequence, creating many requests to the server, each one having its own network lag.
Some reports have also stated that some viewers are better than others, especially Singularity. I remember when I was using Alchemy, it reacted better than Firestorm in this concern. So the problem might be increased by a viewer issue, but there is really poor chances things evolve in the right way without a direct support of Linden Lab on the protocol and the base viewer (which Firestorm is based on).
So what?
Are we fucked up? Well, yes and no.
As a casual user, there is not a lot you can do. If you can use an alternate viewer, like Alchemy, do it. It seems to work better on objects' inventory.
If you host on your personal computer your own simulator connected to a grid, you can try to edit your objects on this region, because if your OpenSim and network are correctly configured, data transfer between the viewer and OpenSim never reaches the network, it stays on your computer, the network bottleneck is avoided.
As a schema might be easier to understand, I quickly made this diagram :
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