To clear cache or not to clear cache that is the question

I’ve been told hundreds if not thousands of times “Aza, clear your cache it will fix everything”. I hate clearing my cache. I honestly do, it takes forever to load, my bandwidth screams at me not to mention that it costs me precious data use, which I get charged per month based on what I use. So, anything to cut down on that I’m happy to do! I recently attended a Firestorm class and this subject in particular caught my attention because I’ve heard this more than I can count, especially dancing every week.

Clearing your cache can do more harm to a sim than good. It adds extra lag, which is what you were trying to avoid doing. It draws the sim resources to retexture and build your cache that you just dumped thus causing high bandwidth use and just a big domino effect. Just think if 10 people did this every week an hour before the show, or even just to do it. They all do it at the same time and log back in at the same time; the sim would flat out hate life having to repeatedly send out the information to each of the 10 avatars that dumped their cache.  So I’m gonna give you the list of Do’s and Don’t that Ed provided at his class. I’m not even gonna take any credit for the information because it can easily be found on their wiki site.

THE DON’T

-won’t help for teleport issues

-upload issues

-movement or communications

-most lag issues

-crashes

-most kind of bake fails

THE DO’s

-texture related – aka crash due to texture failing to load.

If you do have a texture “memory leak” crash,  you can dump just your texture cache and it should fix the issue. To get to your texture cache go to avatar>preferences>network & cache …there you will see Cache location, click the open button and the folder will open in a new window. Once there you want to look for a folder that says texturecache.  You can delete everything in there and it will re-cache them all when you log back in. BUT only do this in extreme cases. Don’t dump your cache just a s a routine habit. It’s better to run on a full or fuller cache than an empty one.  For more information on how this all plays out please check out Firestorm’s wiki page at http://wiki.phoenixviewer.com

Knowledge is power….and power is knowledge so the more informed we are the better off our experience will be on SL.

Well I’m blogged out right now lol…I felt I HAD to pass this on…I hope Ed doesn’t mind too much cause THIS was an important issue that needed to be brought up for us all cause it’s important for our sims integrity and ours as well.

MUCH LOVE!

AZZY XOXOXOXOXOX