Major texture processing rewrite for Opensim

So there I was, standing on my sim on newly rented hardware, hooked up to OSGrid. As I had unfortunately grown accustomed to on Opensim implementations, my avatar had only partly baked, there were several blobs which perhaps had a view to maybe one day becoming sculpties, and anything I rezzed from my inventory seemed to turn out grey and rather dull looking.

I knew that not everyone had as much trouble as me with this, but I soon found out from OSGrid IRC that I wasn’t the only one who had issues with the texture pipeline stalling.

As part of my work with Remedy, I am constantly looking for ways to improve the performance and stability of Opensim, and so naturally I opened up the source code to see if anything needed changing.

As I started tinkering, adjusting things, trying to work out what was causing the issue, it became apparent that the code that was there could do with a little work. To cut  a long story short, I ended up re-writing the module, using some of Teravus’ old code for byte positioning calculations and such.

And i’m pleased to report that it turned out to be a great success.  The patch was submitted on 2009-04-09 22:03, and was committed 3 and a half hours later  by Teravus, the original author of the code that it replaced.

The improvements made by the patch are:

- Increased texture load speed by 200-300%
- Increased packet efficiency greatly, less wasted bandwidth
- Shaken the texture clog issue where textures stopped being delivered
- Implemented texture priorities properly, nearer objects load first
- Reduced memory usage per connected client VERY substantially.

At time of writing i’m starting to get a little feedback as people update to the latest code..

<FrankNichols> just updated to head, first impression of new texture processing – big improvement and so far no negative side affects – mono 2.4, linux 32b.

I put together a little video showing off the difference. Click here to watch in high def for best enjoyment

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