Limbo dancing

Prior to my, umm, sabbatical from the hurly-burly of SL, regular readers may recall, I was having frequent problems with what I called the "blue limbo" problem - this blue limbo being, basically, where I was left when I tried to log in.  The world around me would start to load, and then give it up as a bad job, leaving me hanging around - more or less incompletely loaded myself - unable to move, with my ping time (the time it takes my client to communicate with the server, you can check this out yourself with Advanced>Performance Tools>Statistics Bar) pegged at 10000 milliseconds.  Which is a lot of milliseconds, to be sure.

Well, returning to SL, I was getting this same problem, still, repeatedly.  (It left me in a no-animations default posture at one point - literally crucified upon a login failure.)  So I revived my old support case in as tactful a manner as possible, and much submitting of zipped log files went on, and...

... well, no definite conclusion has been reached, but I'm getting the problem rather less at the moment, and I think I'm beginning to understand why.

Basically, it might be a case of too much rubbish in my inventory.

Well, you know, duh, some might say, and not without due cause.  After all, my inventory is not inconsiderable in size.  And it is rather noticeably over the recommended limits. Let's face it, I have very nearly enough shoes, which is going some.

However - other people with similar building and shopping habits have accumulated even larger inventories than my 50,000 or so items, and still manage without getting limbo'ed.  So, why am I getting this?

I still don't know for sure.  But, the first time I shook myself free of it, it was by deleting my outfits folder, which contained a number of broken links - links to clothing items which the system couldn't resolve, for reasons best known to itself.  And I'm beginning to suspect that the whole problem rests on a more general expression of this.

Basically, what's stitching me up (according to the guys working on my support case) is a timeout, where queries to the database regarding the components of my online self take too long to resolve.  If I'm coming into SL with my inventory empty after a cache clear, I don't get the problem, implying that it lies somewhere in the lengthy process of reconciling the items in my inventory with the records in the database.  Something, somewhere, is taking too long to add up.

So, I've been on - well, you couldn't quite call it an inventory purge exactly - but, at least, a slimming session of conceivably dodgy assets.  Very old freebie items that I haven't worn or used in ages have been zapped - including a pair of boots that persistently threw up those "broken links" in my outfits folder.  A lot of old notecards got the chop - and we know that there's an awful lot of different things can go in a notecard, right?  Calling cards were purged - including some from people I know have had accounts deleted, or have otherwise left SL under a cloud: are those assets which are hard to locate?  A lot of landmarks have been painstakingly removed from shopping folders... including several folders that I got from closing down sales, where in many cases the sims relating to those landmarks don't exist any more.

Now, it may be that I'm barking up the wrong tree completely here.  All this slimming down has brought my inventory down to somewhat under 47,000, and it may be that that's simply a safe size to have, with my particular setup and connection.  But... I have a feeling it may well be worth while removing assets from inventory that I know might be problematical.

Anyway.  We shall, no doubt, see.