"What did you change ?"

or, If the vacuum cleaner did not help...

Some time ago, Veyron had an interesting article about

Second Life crashes, and how they are caused by excessive heat or insufficient power.

While the article contains very reasonable suggestions, I was not really optimistic it would apply for my case.

I was experiencing relatively random crashes, which seemed to be having the following properties:

• they seemed to be very correlated with the changes in the picture - most of the time they would happen after the camera movements, or after the teleports
  
• static areas with little number of elements had much less of a problem
  
• lot of textures seemed to be something almost fatal..
  

With that in mind, I had tuned down pretty much all the settings, with not so great success...

And all of this time I remembered that for a long time before I did not have any problem whatsoever, maybe 1-2 crashes within a few months (compared to 10-15 within a few hours).

There had to be something changed. I did install various sorts of software on the PC in the meantime, however, it was mostly sound-related, nothing video-related...

And suddenly I remembered... Once, in an attempt to "improve" my SL experience (which was already reasonably good), I bumped the "Graphics card memory" in the Advanced Graphics tab in preferences to something I *thought* would be adequate to my card (read: higher than it was before).

So, putting it back...

And no crashes since then. All the other settings pretty much back to maximum. Woohoo!

Crashes can have many different root causes, so this recipe is by no means universal. However, maybe it helps someone...