Talk:Texture Cache

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We can safely avoid the GIF format. It's 256 colors only. it use unisys patent LZW (the good old patent used in the good old GIF expired, but unisys repatent'd it because of some "improvments" in the algorithm.). Unisys suddenly claimed they wanted royalties to encode GIF file, and just for that we shouldn't use it. source : License Information on GIF and Other LZW-based Technologies -- kerunix Flan

The last of the patents expired in October 2006. GIF is no longer patent encumbered. But PNG is still better. Keep in mind by recompressing the image to cache it you're trading CPU usage for disk space. Compression is usually a lot slower than decompression. Just storing uncompressed might be overall faster. In the end, we need to assume nothing and benchmark, benchmark, benchmark. Seg Baphomet 22:45, 23 March 2007 (PDT)
The GIF format is not suitable. It only supports 256 colors per frame. It does not support semi-transparent pixels. PNG is a superior format. Has anyone considered the time required to re-encode images in the target format? Strife Onizuka 09:42, 24 March 2007 (PDT)


There appears to be support with APR for a portable interface to common databases, namely Berkely-DB and SQL. Dzonatas Sol 18:23, 23 March 2007 (PDT)


It would be useful to get stats on current and new hardware profiles from LL to get a sense of what people are using and where the focus should lie. Iron Perth 03:00, 23 March 2007 (PDT)


I can't find it in the spec, but i think this format give the warranty that images of a given size will always have the same file size. (without RLE of course). This may help for some optimization.

Additionaly, the "developper area" of the TGA file format could be used to store some usefull information.—The preceding unsigned comment was added by kerunix Flan

Converting images into the TGA format for cache storage has the advantage that the client already supports rendering TGA images. It would be one of the easiest solutions. Images with the same dimensions would all be the same but otherwise would be different in size. Strife Onizuka 02:22, 24 March 2007 (PDT)

Faster Formats

Contribution from Tofu Linden from the email discussion

RLE is cheap but also not very effective at all for many, many textures; wherever I might have used RLE in ye olden days I'd now use trusty old zlib or blingy liblzf, the latter of which is more or less on the same order of speed as RLE but a LOT more effective on data (images) with redundancy not necessarily manifesting as runs of pixels. Iron Perth 02:30, 24 March 2007 (PDT)

And as said on the mailling, the destructive effect of JPEG2000 probably killed any chance to have a good compression rate using RLE. RLE is fast and the only compression supported by the Targavision specification. If we don't use it (probably because it's useless) then don't use compression at all. One of the advantage of using RLE like said in the specification is that we don't have to decompress anything to read the header, developer area, and footer. Kerunix Flan 08:02, 24 March 2007 (PDT)
I think I missed the bit about "the destructive effect of JPEG2000" on the list. Currently lossy compression is only used when the source is a JPEG and lossless for BMP and TGA. The point of using a format like JPEG2000 is that it achieves high compression ratios superior to other formats for the same image quality. For modern codecs to achieves high compression ratios they sacrifice CPU time. The reason for the push for higher ratios is to reduce the amount of storage and bandwidth required for transmission. If SL moves away from using JPEG2000 and towards a less CPU intensive, lower compression ratio codec, the asset servers will be serving more data per asset request. This seems like a step backwards and not forwards. As an intermediate format to save CPU time to avert the costly re-decoding of an image, it makes sense to pick a faster format though it will be costly in diskspace; and as long as the disk is not horibly fragmented it has the potential to be faster then decoding. A format needs to fit these criteria to be considered for this task:
  1. Lossless
  2. Support a variable number of channels.
  3. Fast to encode, fast to decode
  4. Preferably GPL compatible.
This excludes: GIF & JPEG. This may also exclude PNG because most implementations treat anything that is fully transparent as rgba(0,0,0,0); white images develop black outlines at low resolutions (not lossless). Strife Onizuka 21:08, 24 March 2007 (PDT)

Current Caching

Both Tofu and Steve have made the point they feel cache hit rate issues are a priority..

Contribution from Steve Linden from email discussion:

2. The way we calculate texture pixel coverage (and therefore desired discard level) is as follows:

a. When anything using a texture is rendered. set its pixel coverage to MAX(current pixel coverage, rendered pixel coverage)

b. Once a frame, reduce the current pixel coverage of all textures by 10%.

This way, everything rendered recently has an accurate pixel coverage, and everything not rendered degrades over time. gImageList.mForceResetTextureStats merely tells the code "assume that all textures are no longer visible" and resets the pixel area of all texture to 0. As soon as they are rendered their pixel coverage is updated.

3. Even if a textures pixel coverage gets set to 0, we do not immediately discard the texture data. We only discard the data if we need room for more textures (in which case we discard the textures with the lowest priority), or if no object in view is using the texture *and* 30 seconds have elapsed.

do that mean that, even if we have a lot of VRAM available, the texture will be removed from cache if we don't see the texture for 30s ? and then, moving our avatar in the sim will make the client redecoding the texture from cache to load it in VRAM again ? Why not discarding the texture only when we're out of memory ? (please delete/replace this comment by the answer) Kerunix Flan 08:18, 24 March 2007 (PDT)

4. Tateru is absolutely correct in that caching textures to disk mostly just saves on network bandwidth. Unless you have a slow network connection, it can be almost as fast to load textures across the network as from a disk, especially if that disk is not especially fast or is fragmented. Decoding the textures takes quite a bit longer. However, if you have multiple CPUs and enable Client > Rendering > Run Multiple Threads, the decoding will be done on the second CPU and go much faster.

I can't believe loading a texture from a remote cache isn't much slower than loading a texture from a local cache. And if you add the usual packet loss and high ping (for non-us user) it's *certainly* much slower. Kerunix Flan 08:18, 24 March 2007 (PDT)

He also makes some interesting comments about teleporting around and filling up the texture cache. Check out his original email here:

Iron Perth 02:44, 24 March 2007 (PDT)

Home Cache

If a resident has a home, why not have a separate texture cache for it, a Home Cache. This cache would only be explicitly cleared down and would be accessed first by the client when the resident logs on or teleports home.

Once populated with textures, each logon/teleport to home would not involve network traffic, as they would be available locally, on the client.

Benja Kepler 02:52, 24 March 2007 (PDT)

A similar idea would be to have a hit count on textures. The hit count can be kept around much longer than the texture data. The hit count would be used to indicate what textures to keep in the cache longer. Dzonatas Sol 12:53, 24 March 2007 (PDT)

Textures in Inventory

A search through the avatar's inventory is a good indication of what textures to keep around longer in the cache than others. Dzonatas Sol 12:50, 24 March 2007 (PDT)

Plan: Normalization of Texture Usage

A method to keep the statistics of pixel coverage and hit rates: We use a collection of hit counters such that each represents an individual entry for an associated texture. When any hit counter hits a threshold, the collection is normalized and the results are stored in each associated hit-rate fields of the entry. The hit-rate fields may store percentages for short term and long term storage. The short term and long term storage indicators present a value for determination in how textures are archived or disposed. Pixel-coverage rates are optional fields in each entry for determination of an optimal storage medium for texture data such that the medium is represented in uncompressed or compressed methods and if the stored texture is downsampled and to what degree it is downsampled. Dzonatas Sol 17:05, 24 March 2007 (PDT)

Idea: Keep a cache index

Keep an on-disk index of cache files. This could be made compact and small enough to fully into RAM. The index would allow to know whether a file is in the cache, thus avoiding trying to open a file if the current way of storing a texture in its own file is kept.

Additionally, store some metadata with: filesize, md5sum, and a very rough texture approximation (perhaps even limited to a solid color) to have something better than the current grey.

Filesize and md5sum would allow to check the on-disk files' integrity, which should avoid any need to clear the cache, as correctness could be automatically verified.

My suggested format for the index is Berkeley DB, which is simple and compact, and is ACID compliant, which should ensure the integrity of the index. Dale Glass 15:39, 24 March 2007 (PDT)

The old VFS used an index, while it didn't keep a hash of the asset it did track access date. If you are going to be using a DB on top of the cache, you might as well put the entire cache in a single file and save on file system IO. Why? After all a VFS is just a database of sorts and regardless you have to search the DB or the FS for the file. There were two problems with the old VFS: slow to find data in the index and slow to decode images (this isn't the fault of the VFS). A well designed VFS should be able to out perform any FS (because it doesn't have to perform locks). Strife Onizuka 19:12, 24 March 2007 (PDT)
The filesystem is already an entirely suitable way of keeping data like textures. It does have a few problems for example, such as that searching for a file in a directory may be relatively expensive. This can be easily compensated for with a small DB used only to compensate for those shortcomings. A full VFS-like thing is a lot more complex, you basically have to write your own mini-filesystem, and as we've seen, that's hard to do well. Berkeley DB is especially nice in that it's ACID - you have a guarantee of that data in it is consistent, unlike with the VFS (unless you go and code that in, but that takes time). Also, by keeping a collection of small items of data of a fixed size you avoid internal fragmentation, which is something you'd have to deal with a VFS-like approach. If you store textures as files, just use the system defragmenter. Dale Glass 19:43, 24 March 2007 (PDT)

Idea: Keep a texture map for every sim

Currently, dual core CPUs have a large amount of spare time on the second core while they're not actively fetching textures. I propose a way of using this spare time.

The viewer would create a database per visited sim with a list of textures found in each location. This database would allow the viewer to know what textures can be found in nearby areas, even before the grid has transmitted the data about them. Then, when idle, the viewer could use the spare time to start loading textures from the surrounding areas, so that they are instantly available when the avatar moves.

My suggested way of doing that is using a Berkeley DB database to store the data. A simple way of storing the data would be making the key the position inside the sim, rounded to for example multiples of 16 meters. The data stored for that key would be a list of textures used in that area.

For example, the position (120,90,56) when rounded to multiples to 16m translates to (112, 80, 48). Under key "112,80,48" the viewer would store a list of textures used inside that 16x16x16 area.

This should make several optimizations possible:

  • When teleporting to a new area, decoding of textures can be started before the grid had time to transmit the required information. It should be possible to start loading textures immediately after the user starts the teleport, while the progress bar is still being shown.
  • When the avatar moves around, the viewer could start decoding textures likely to be present in locations about which there's no data available yet. This might make flying less painful.
  • If a storage method like the VFS, which stores multiple textures in a file is chosen, then having this data available could make it possible to optimize the placement of the texture data on disk, for optimal loading. Dale Glass 15:39, 24 March 2007 (PDT)

Stupid question: Why not just have the sim send the object definitions too? You can glean UUIDs for the images from the objects. Then you don't have to ask the sim for the objects too. Wait but isn't that just the same as looking in all directions at the same time (but only rendering what is infront of the camera). The great part about just asking for the object definitions is that there already is code inplace for caching those definitions. No need to hack in an entirely new DB. Silly question: Is this an efficient way to spend sim CPU time: Serving assets not in view and in directions other then that the user is pointing? Downloading textures while the client is in TP is a bad idea; what if the user doesn't have access to the sim (it takes some time for TP's to fail)? It would be a bad thing for say SAP to try to TP into Oracle's private sim (knowing full well that the TP would fail) in an attempt to glean insider information via texture pre-caching (linky). Strife Onizuka 19:34, 24 March 2007 (PDT)
Sorry, I don't think I succeeded at getting the idea across. It wouldn't involve requesting anything extra from the sim. The idea is that the viewer would compile a database of texture usage inside sims you visited, so when you started teleporting to a sim, it could look in its database and start preloading images from its cache that are likely to be found in the place you're teleporting to. Basically, instead of waiting for the sim to tell you what's there and then loading the images, it would load from the cache things that are likely to be there (as sims don't change all that often), and when the sim does finally give you the data, you'd already have a part of the images decoded and ready to show. If you visited a place in the past, I think there should be a very good chance of mostly correctly guessing the textures needed to render it.
SAP problem wouldn't happen because the mechanism would work based on information you previously got, so you'd have to have been to the place before for it to work. Dale Glass 19:56, 24 March 2007 (PDT)