[Opensim-users] Avatars never "bake" completely after activating FlotsamCache

[Gwyneth Llewelyn]

Hello all,

When I upgraded my grid to 0.7.2, I forgot to activate FlotsamCache (which I had successfully used in the past). Once I corrected that mistake, something strange happened: now avatars are always flickering back and forth, refreshing their textures, and never fully bake. They might show up baked on the viewer, but other avatars in the region will always see them blank ("white avatars").

Now this is not always consistent. On most sims of the grid, which run CentOS 5.3 (64 bits) and OpenSim 0.7.2 (release) was compiled with Mono 2.6.1, the problem started as soon as FlotsamCache was activated. On one "test" sim, running on my home Mac, with exactly the same options on OpenSim.ini etc. (but compiled under Mono 2.6.4), and FlotsamCache also active, there seems to be absolutely no problem.

There are a lot of possible reasons for the difference in behaviour, one of which is that I've added a few more debugging options on the CentOS 5.3 OpenSim source — I'm still trying to figure out the problems with XMLRPC requests — and these might have broken something. Or the compilation under Mono 2.6.1 (64 bits) might be slightly broken. Or the Mono compiler for the Mac might produce better code than the one for Linux (which would surprise me immensely!). Or I might be hitting a memory limit (I'm using FlotsamCache in memory *and* disk). Or, well, anything else could explain this behaviour. :-)

Since turning off FlotsamCache is not a good idea (and the alternatives, as warned on the OpenSimulator Wiki, are not as well maintained...), I filed an "issue" on Flotsam's page at Google Code — http://code.google.com/p/flotsam/issues/detail?id=54 But so far I didn't get  reply, so I wonder if anyone in this group has seen this odd behaviour and managed to do a simple fix. The reported issue adds some more details and a log of the errors I get under CentOS.

If I hadn't tested OpenSim under the Mac (which runs only a single region, even though with dozens of thousands of prims), which works flawlessly, I'd attribute it as a bug :) Because it works well under the Mac, but not under Linux, I have to assume that the configuration is wrong somewhere. Since the configuration is exactly the same, it might mean that to properly support baking under CentOS 5.3 + FlotsamCache, I might have to flip a switch somewhere, which for some obscure reason is not needed under the Mac. So, suggestions are welcome!

Thanks in advance,

	- Gwyn


--
"I'm not building a game. I'm building a new country."
  -- Philip "Linden" Rosedale, interview to Wired, 2004-05-08