A Cacheman cache or a scenery cache or both?

[Guest]

I have 512mb of PC133 RAM and run Win98SE, with Cacheman on fairly high disk cache maximum - 45 mb, their recommended gamer setting.As 2K2 seems to fill up some 200mb worth of memory addresses on load, do you think:1. A settings/scenery cache of 100 is OK - if not more or less?2. Higher Cacheman disk cache numbers mean less reserved by Windows - so does that mean if I grabbed a 200-ish mb cache with Cacheman it would be a jolly good thing?3. Does the 2K2 settings/scenery cache fight with Cacheman's cache for memory?I have ConservativeSwapFileUsage=1 in system.ini, and a fixed size swap file of 500.All observations welcome.PH

[Guest]

A couple of thoughts Phil. The FS2002 scenery cache is a disk cache, not a memory cache. It's intended to cache scenery from the CD to the HDD on systems with less than a full install. With a full install the scenery cache is never used so the sizing becomes moot in that case. And with a partial install it's a separate issue from the Vcache settings. As far as Cacheman goes, it's a carryover from the days of Win95 and systems with 64MB RAM. I don't think there is anything to be gained on your system by using it.Trip

[Guest Lizardo]

I've got a 550 athlon, 96mb, and ME. That was my experience with cacheman too. Lots to play with, but I didn't see any noticeable improvements. Same for the library cache size..no diff if set very high, so back to 100. Killing everything except "explorer" and "systray" makes a diff though.

[John_Cillis 2,406]

First, don't use 2k2's scenery cache.... Probably one of the most misunderstood features of 2k2, its purpose is for partial installations, where scenery is pulled off of the CD to be stored on the faster HD. On full installations, all you're telling FS2002 to do is to take scenery from one place on the HD, and move it to another--an extra step which saps performance in 2k2. Having said this, why do some people report "improvements" by enabling and increasing FS2002's cache? IMHO, some of it is what I call the "mass influence" syndrome, where someone reported such an improvement, and others chimed in moved by the "crowd". To a lesser degree, badly fragmented drives might see an improvement if scenery is loaded to an unfragmented cache, but I suspect this is rare--and defragmenting would solve that issue anyway.With 512Megs of RAM, let Windows manage your swap file! But I must warn you--I've been a LAN/WAN admin since the pre-NT days of Unix and Novell, and someone else with exactly the same level of experience will come in here and tell you to fix your swap file, citing all sorts of anecdotal reports. My "crowd" theory regarding the FS2002 cache applies to the fixed swap file as well--although it was good in the day of sub 128 meg systems. Why let Windows manage it? Because you are blessed with 512megs of RAM, and having limited your vcache, you should not see any swap file usage--ever.... Even with only 256megs of RAM, mine has never grown beyond 0 megs, even with System Monitor on for one 18 hour stretch while I was recording some stats for this very forum....As for your vcache settings, they are on par with mine. I do set the ConservativeSwapfileUsage flag, and I do fix my vcache settings (manually, vs. cacheman which just puts a GUI on what is essentially a system.ini setting). Beyond 32 megs of vcache, I've noticed very little improvement in system and 2k2 performance. As for conflicts, the 2k2 cache and vcache have nothing to do with each other....as said earlier, the 2k2 is a HD cache, and the vcache is a RAM cache.-John

[Guest]

Well thank you all! I had no idea that we were talking about a hard drive cache - I did imagine that 2K2 was grabbing some dedicated memory with that scenery cache. I use a full install so won't be using it in future. Many thanks.As for Cacheman, it's done it's job, so that's now turned off, and Windows has the swap file again.I've also grabbed EnditAll to close the apps in the sys tray, and now rest peacefully knowing I've done just about all I can. Thanks again for your input folks.PH

[Guest Lizardo]

Following advice here, I put 2k2's cache down to ten...a vast improvement. Thanks!

[Guest]

Well said John ... the only reason to fix your swap file size is simply to have it preallocate the disk space. Coupling this with moving the file to the very start of the drive will offer a tiny bit of performance ASSUMING you run enough things on your machine to cause a lot of swapping. On a 512 Meg machine, with FS eating about 200 Megs, your AGP card eating 64 Megs, and the OS eating some more, there is absolutely no reason for your machine to touch the swap file.Ray