Smaller SL cache = better performance?

Just had a discussion with somebody over what the SL viewer cache size should be. They were saying that many RP sims ask visitors to cut their caches down to 200MB to improve performance.. Bit of a language problem but it seemed she was saying that it helped in places where the textures change frequently.

This seems totally backwards to me.. Am I missing something here? Assuming a fairly new machine with a lot of free disk space, is there any performance reason to not max the cache size?

See this thread from last week:
/111/01/207081/1.html

A few of the new render pipeline first look viewers had an option for a bigger (unlimited?) cache size, but LL pulled it back out again because it was adversely affecting - client-side - performance, so it could be possible with the sizes we have now too.

The cache doesn't seem particularly efficient in what it keeps and what it discards.

Actually, there is. The stuff you have in your cache folder is a bit like junk your system needs to hoist up at every startup. The bigger the cache, the more junk you load on startup. Also, the client checks if textures etc are in the cache folder, and from a certain size on it takes longer to browse the files on disk than to just reload them.

I've found that I really have better performance if I keep a lean cache, 250 MB was the recommendation in one book I read, and that one has proven pretty stable for me. I thought too that bigger might be better, but when I tried out 500 or 800 for a while, the client was slower and texture loading actually took longer.

If it's really faster to get stuff off a sim than from your local disk, I'd say that's a bit of an understatement. (yeah, I quoted you a little out of context but it worked really well)

For any of the open source gurus out there, how about taking a look at this? Seems better client-side caching would be less load on the servers. Win/win..

There can be gains, but its system dependant. Personally, I have a fixed system cache on one HD and the SL cache on another. Each HD uses its own controller (not slave or partition) in a Raid setup. I keep the HD's defraged regularily.

It works for me... but not everyone has the same system blah blah....