Extremeley Slow Texturing loading/rendering.
tracked
Liam Puppy
Textures are extremely slow to render. This is happening to about myself and a dozen friends of mine. For some reason over the last two weeks textures in SL irregardless of if they are 1k or 2k are taking forever to render a great amount of the time. It also seems to be affecting performance of each viewer as well. I can provide images and video recordings if requested. Clean installing, clearing cache, increasing cache size limits, etc. all do not change the issue.
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Artemis Nightingale
Something similar has been affecting me since last year with the release of the PBR viewer. Grey textures everywhere. It did improve earlier this year, but has since degraded again. It seems to happen most when I do drives across mainland crossing multiple regions and filling up the cache. Eventually textures simply stop loading completely and everything is grey until I relog and clear the cache.
Atlas Linden
tracked
Thanks for the extra info, all!
This report has now been imported to https://github.com/secondlife/viewer/issues/4493 for further investigation.
Beatrice Voxel
Viewer folder whitelisting is a very effective 'fix' for slow texture/mesh loads (doubly so if you use a TPV). If you don't whitelist, every file that gets written to your cache gets scanned by your AV suite, which is minor if it's just one or two, but when a sim has hundreds or even thousands of textures (nevermind what any avatars bring with them), that's a lot of processor cycles wasted.
This also brings up the idea of 'pre-visits'. If you've never been to a sim before, you'll have to load it when you go there the first time. The same goes for when you haven't visited in a while - the elements will likely be expired in cache if they're even present at all. So if you want to get decent performance while visiting a sim... show up early, give your viewer a chance to get everything in cache.
And then there's the "techie" fix - where is your cache? what kind of drive is it being written to? Older systems with physical drives will be noticeably slower than those with m.2 PCIe or even SATA solid-state storage. So IF you've installed your viewer to a slow drive, consider reinstalling it to a fast one. If you can't do that for reasons, you can also redirect just the cache folders to another drive. You want to choose something that can handle a lot of reads and writes, but for smaller files. External drives are slow, and RAID arrays can also slow things down.
Another source of file write delays are mirrored folders. Services like iCloud or OneDrive will latch onto 'important' system folders, like Documents, Pictures and so on, and they will copy every file that gets written or changed. Not only does this delay things with your processor doing extra work, but your net bandwidth gets hit, cos you're uploading everything that gets streamed to your system. Since most people's net connections are asynchronous (big download bandwidth, itty bitty upload pipe), you can easily max the upload and now you've a queue... which slows things down really bad. So make sure that your viewer's cache location is NOT in some subfolder that OneDrive thinks is important and needs to be mirrored to the cloud.
Liam Puppy
Beatrice Voxel My PC is only six months old, and came with zero programs on it other than what was required to make it. 128GB Ram, Ryzen 9, 2tb/2tb, RTX 4070 ti Super, X670 Chipset and a 1 Gig line. I have issues across Alchemy, Firestorm, and SL Viewer, and Black Dragon. SL has run perfectly fine up until a few weeks ago. My other programs, games, etc all run without issue, etc. I am certain my system is not the issue.
Beatrice Voxel
Liam Puppy The most modern system can be hamstrung by simple things, most of them configuration choices or background processes such as what I outlined.
Eren Padar
Beatrice Voxel This texture bottleneck issue is as old as SL... and has been submitted on numerous other forums since as early as 2005 (and perhaps before that). I myself have conducted data hunts, as has top-tech Balpien Hammerer. Balpien identified LL reloading the same textures over and over again from the asset servers, literally creating a DDoSA on their own system... but LL didn't listen to him.
I've been having good conversations with Dan Linden lately, as well as sent him data, photographs of texture SLag, and test results using SL's own texture load test board. The results were so obvious this has been sent from these Feedback forums to Canny.
For more than two decades there have been very obvious texture load and display bottlenecks, which affects everything from environment, to vending machines, to avatars showing up as orange clouds because their textures are failing to load. This is a very real problem that in most cases is not user computer oriented. I have a finely-tuned / whitelisted mid-level gamer system (3060 12 gig graphics card and 32 gigs RAM on a very fast i5 motherboard). Such system should have no trouble at all with texture loading but it does. This is what I've been discussing with Dan. When I'm at my own store... a store I visit regularly, I was at one minute ago, visit a shop right next door, then return to my store only to have all of the textures blurred out and gray again... that is strong indication there are coding / cache / bottleneck issues with the software.
As others have reported, I have no lag, bottleneck or texture problems with any other program I use... only Second Life.
As I mentioned to Dan: If the 2D don't work, the 3D don't work. This is a problem that has needed heavily examined and resolved for over two decades.
DelicateSoul Resident
I confirm this experience. It sometimes takes up to three minutes for textures to fully load. (Apple Mac M1)
Window-Paths are less helpful ;-) Not sure, if it is really a Whitelist Issue.
steph Arnott
There are several reasons for this, limited data reception (ie broadband), your computer specs, anti-virus scan because SL is not whitelisted, time of day(some providers throttle when high demand), bad RAM, registry full off garbage, HD a mess or failing. A few more, but white listing if you have anti-virus is a start.
Eren Padar
steph Arnott There is also mal-functioning SL software, both server side and viewer. To blame end-user systems is ignoring the fact that tons of other software works just fine... but SL doesn't. There is code in the viewer that isn't documented and even Devs don't know what it does. I've spoken with one of the top Devs there is who stated the Viewer code is a mess. So no telling what the server and asset software is like.
Yes, individual computers CAN cause problems, but this problem has been noted, tracked, defined, and data gathered for some 2 decades. What needs to be examined closely isn't generally user systems (which work just fine with other high-level software); in my opinion it's primarily LL software that needs examined.
steph Arnott
Eren Padar, for the love of Mary, stop informing us of you total ignorance.
Eren Padar
steph Arnott Usually I don't respond to such replies, but the nature of that post deserves calling out. Everything I stated in my post is accurate and factual. There is no excuse for your arrogant reply.
We are here to discuss the sources of this problem. I worked for 35 years as a professional corporate consultant in the computer field and have been on SL for over 21 years, doing about everything possible to do-- including helping in major debugging of the system. So maybe leave the repetitious ego-attitude at the door and show a little more respect for other users-- especially those who likely know quite a bit more about computers and Second Life than you do. Blaming user computers for SL problems has become an over-used cliche, especially when it is obviously system coding/performance issues that are the problem.
Atlas Linden
needs info
For users seeing this issue, can you please provide your system information?
Also, are there any regions in particular that appear to reproduce this extremely slow texture loading?
If anyone can also provide images or video that would also be helpful. For attachments that cannot be accepted by Canny, feel free to send them to bug-attachments@lindenlab.com and be sure to mention this report in your email.
As hinaichigo Xaris mentioned in their comment, whitelisting the cache folders could also improve texture loading. Here's a list of the folders to whitelist in your antivirus program:
- C:\Program Files\SecondLifeViewer - the viewer install folder.
- C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Local\SecondLife - the viewer cache folder.
- C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Roaming\SecondLife - the viewer settings folder.
Liam Puppy
Atlas Linden Hey Atlas :) Thanks! All whitelisted from the start, no issues there. I will gather some visuals and email them over to you. Thanks for taking the time to respond!! Also specs: My PC is only six months old, and came with zero programs on it other than what was required to make it. 128GB Ram, Ryzen 9, 2tb/2tb, RTX 4070 ti Super, X670 Chipset and a 1 Gig line. Have never had any issues with SL until last few weeks and it's specifically textures, nothing else.
Damian Zhaoying
Atlas Linden
I'm on linux and my PC specs are this:
CPU: AMD FX(tm)-6300 Six-Core Processor (3816.82 MHz)
Memory: 19956 MB
Linux 6.8.0-64-generic #67-Ubuntu SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Sun Jun 15 20:23:31 UTC 2025 x86_64
Graphic Card: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060/PCIe/SSE2 With 12 GB RAM
One thing I could see is randomly connection issues with asigned cdn. One moment I have no issue, but, next login download texture is too slow, and ping to cdn server is very high.
Another thing I noticed is a lot of errors in viewer's logs like this:
"Possible failure [Http_404] cannot GET url 'http://asset-cdn.glb.agni.linden
lab.com/?material_id=275e98f9-437a-0744-aa5f-89ffa4f0f707' because Not Found"
May be cdn mirror is not up to date?
SaludOS/2
hinaichigo Xaris
Try whitelisting the cache folders in your antivirus. that solved the problem for me.
Liam Puppy
hinaichigo Xaris It's all whitelisted, not an issue at all.