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June 2007
Memory Leak Fixes
apollo [slupdate] Mon 11th @ 08:15 EDT
client, patch comments
I can scarcely describe how happy this announcement makes me. In amongst the various fixes for this release are these gems:
Fixed VWR-966: Minor memory leak in llfloaterpreferences.cpp and a tiny leak in llstatup.cpp.
Fixed VWR-908: Various memory leaks in the group dialog.
Fixed VWR-364: Viewer memory leak.
Memory leaks are often a problem in complex software and can be one of the hardest things to track down, while also being one of the major offenders as far as lost performance is concerned. In simple terms, once the SL client consumes all the available physical RAM in a given computer, the Operating System has to use temporary space on the computer's hard drive in lieu of "real" RAM. Hard drives have much slower access times than physical RAM, so a PC afflicted in this way will begin to chug and churn and stutter and performance will be reduced to virtually nothing whenever the contents of memory has to be paged back and forth between RAM and hard drive.
Memory leaks contribute heavily to this state because RAM that should be freed up is in fact held onto and then more RAM is used on top of that and so on until there's none left. So fixing bugs like these should hopefully have a tremendously positive impact on viewer performance and hence a positive impact on the overall user experience.
January 2007
All I Want For Christmas Is a New Rendering Engine
apollo [slupdate] Tue 9th @ 08:48 EST
client, open source, second life
Linden Lab has released the source code for the Second Life client, as noted on the OLB in a post titled Embracing the Inevitable. I could pen a rambling treatise on the subject and I may indeed do exactly that at a point where I have sufficient focus and time to donate, but the essential "cliff notes" version reads approximately thus: this can only be a good thing.
For those largely unfamiliar with the term OSS - the Open Source Software movement as opposed to the city - I would encourage perusal of The Cathedral and the Bazaar, one of the early essays from a then-emerging field.