Putting SL's Cache onto a RamDrive ?

Just struck me..........

With the talk about Cache size (and it's current low setting)

Then the debate about it not being too large as it may be faster to download the texture agan than to hunt it off your HDD's cache.

Has anyone ever tried using a little app to create a RamDrive on their PC (using some of your system ram) and then pointing SL'c client to use this RamDrive rather than a physical HDD.

Gotta be worth a try....No ?

Ah well, after doing more searching, I see this has already been talked about here before.

Though it does not seem like many have actually tried it and reported back their findings.

Yeah, I tried it and it didn't seem to make a significant difference. I believe if your computer has enough memory to do that, Windows is already caching the data giving you similar benefits, and do it more efficiently than a RAM drive would.

Thanks for the info.

Yeah, I did in the end find some talk, but no real "WOW it's so much different" outcome, so I guess it's not worth the trouble in finding out myself then

On this topic, so we have an "Forums Agreement" yet as to the size you should set your CACHE to? I'm running the BETA version on my PC and I've not touched the default value of 500MB.

I set my cache as big as I can. Back when you could, I had mine at 10G and the only problem I had was that I didn't have to wait to download textures so often. Of course they screwed up the texture cache for "security reasons" when they cut it to 1GB max, so I put mine on a hardware RAM drive at that point.

I keep a separate partition for my SL Cache.

Ah right.

I had been reading some other threads on this Cache Size subject and (from what I remember) I thought there were 2 issues:

LL have currently messed about with the Cache Size Slider and (in the Beta version) there was talk about it being fixed no matter how high up you set it (or something like that)

Secondly some talk about it being quicker to download a texture (if you have a good connection) than for your HDD to hunt around for it.

Don't know what "facts" these two things were based upon?

Ramdrive cache was of no great improvement really. Putting the cache on a second fast drive seemed to help a little. I even tried installing SL to a Ramdrive and it made loading rather snappy but didn't help after that at all.

Hopefully that's on a separate physcal disk, too. Moving it to a different partition on the same disk won't help performance much, if any.

I just max out the Network Cache.

Since I have enough memory for Windows to efficiently cache it all, I figure any fine tuning on my part is probably pointless.

Given that poor OpenGL support seems to be a bigger bottleneck than just about anything other than bandwith when it comes to SL on Windows, I doubt you'd notice any difference at all.

On Linux (and probably MacOS as well), the OS is already using "free" RAM to cache recently accessed files, expunging data from the cache in a least-recently-used fashion; tying up a big chunk of RAM for a ramfs is likely to hurt performance compared to just letting the OS's filesystem handler do it's job.

Bottom line: No matter how you cut it, it's probably more bother than it's worth.

I used a thumb drive for my Second Life cache for a while. I use Linux. I did not notice a significant difference.

Well, if you're really a propeller head and understand disk geometry, you could take advantage of the inside tracks for performance. Odds are it'll be one of those things where it only makes a difference on benchmarks and not particularly humanly perceptable.

Flash isn't all that fast, USB has high latency and isn't all that fast either. Cache on a flash drive isn't anything like cache in DRAM.