Increase Disk Cache Size

Anyone know a way to increase the Disk Cache Size above 1000MB?


I've found that all the crashes I've had with SL, is due to SL filling the limit to the Disk Cache. If it's set really low it doesn't take long before it freezes completely. If it's set high it takes a much longer time(About 5 sims worth of textures/objects), thus the reason why I want to increase it.

Under Advanced->Debug Settings you can force CacheSize to a higher value. I believe the settings UI may not show the higher number even if you change it. You'll want to know that the 1000 cap is intentional because the cache tends to perform poorly when it gets much larger, but there is no harm trying to see if results are acceptable for you.

Thanks, hopefully 20 Gigs should do the job...

My disks defrag automatically everyday, so hopefully there shouldn't be too much of a problem with lower performance due to huge amounts of files.

That and my PC's pretty quick anyway. =p

If SL is crashing because of the cache, and you need to defragment your hard drive daily, the problem is probably with your computer, not SL.

Perhaps a surface scan or a larger hard drive are in order.

Where is it found? Is Advanced under one of the menus?

ctrl+alt+D will activate the Advanced menu on your menu bar

/me mumbles something about overkill and diminishing returns.

If you're going to go with a cache that big, Casey, I'd highly recommend increasing the size of your MFT on whatever drive the cache resides (which hopefully is NOT the same drive as your OS is on). Otherwise, with all those thousands of small individual files, your MFT could easily fill up, and then fragment, even with auto-defrag in place, and then performance on the disk can suffer dramatically.

But that's all really beside the point. As Milla said, SL shouldn't crash just because of a full cache. In fact, the cache should pretty much always be "full" all the time, unless you've manually cleared it, or you've just never logged in before. Take a look at the properties of your cache folder, and you should see it's got the full amount of file space taken up. Mine, for example, currently has .98GB of files in it, which could well be described as "1000MB", depending on how you're counting. Notice, the preferences screen doesn't say 1GB, which would be 1024MB; it just says 1000MB, which could have a few different definitions.

So even if you do raise your cache to 20GB, don't expect it not to fill up. You'll just end up with 20GB worth of files instead of 1000MB. It might just take a bit longer to get to that point, but you WILL get to it.

There's got to be something else going on with your computer that's causing the problem.

Increasing the size of your cache through debug or other UI tricks will not work, because the 1gb limit is hard-coded into the source, and overrules any preference or Debug command.

The reason for this limit is that currently, 80% of the total cache size is used for Texture Cache, and 20% is used for a Virtual File System (VFS) stored in-memory that caches objects - prims, sounds, animations, etc. At 1GB, that means that 200mb of memory is being taken up /just/ by the VFS. There's also overhead for the texture cache, part of which is kept in-memory. The larger your cache size, the larger the memory footprint needed.

There was some discussion a few months ago about revamping the cache system - a near-complete overhaul - but it had stagnated. If I ever get the time again, I'll start doing some more work on that. In the meantime, 1gb is the max it will ever be, no matter how you tweak it.