Possible fix for Cache Problems

I have had my cache cranked up to 1000mgs since the early days and it worked fine before. As many complained lately, the cache has not been working for me that well since 1.7 version. I am not sure the exact point where it turned to crap but I know it did.

Yesterday I read a post about how finding a file in such a large cache might actually take longer than downloading it from Linden Labs and the light went on in my head. I reconfigured my settings so that my cache is no larger than 200Mgs and I also cleared out my cache and quit before relaunching (you have to do quit for cache to clear).

The performance seems MUCH MUCH better. Am I imagining this change or has anyone else had this experience.

I am on a Mac OS X Tiger running 15 inch PowerMac Laptop with 1.25mhz powerpc g4 processor and 2gigs of ram, ATI graphics card with 64mg ram. Oh one more thing, I am on either T1 or cable modem depending on if I signed on at work or at home.

Anyone else have similar experiences with the Cache.

Troy

You may have just unknowingly killed Second Life for a day.

Yes, but it has proven to be a real bitch to quantify.

If your PC is really and you have a really fast connection, yeah, it's possible that re-streaming stuff all the time would be easier than caching it and searching through it. If you're a lowly european on a 512K DSL with a 250ms ping time, then pump that cache all the way up to 1 gig.

I myself was able to temporarily cure my cache issues when I followed a post (I dont have the link, maybe someone else does?) that explained how to transfer the SL Cache to a RAMDisk. I did this for about a week (the software I choose to to use was a trial, and I wanted something that would save my data when I restarted my PC), during this period I saw an incredible improvement in SL's performance... The poster said he had recieved a 400% increase. I dont know if mine was that much, but it was incredibly better.

Hosting your cache on a ramdisk isn't going to help much if you have less than a few gigs of ram or reboot your computer frequently ....

That's a bit vague Do you mean:

* Wall-clock time taken to fully load a scene has dropped? (ie you're timing it)
* The client feels less jerky/stuttery when it's loading a new scene?
* Both?
* Something else?

Also does it make any difference when visiting a scene you never visited before?

Intuitively (which probably means I'm wrong) I'd expect SL to be smoother but slower when using only the network, and faster but more jerky when using the disk cache.

By "slow" I mean for instance taking 10 seconds to fully load a scene instead of 5 seconds.
And by "jerky" I mean FPS dropping really low for a bit.

Actually all you need is at least 768mb to do it, many SL'ers on the forums here have at least that much though obviously more is better. And honestly its a good idea anyway to purge your cache every now and then since the cache becomes heavily fragmented over a short period of time reducing load times and the client has proven itself to reduntantly download the same stuff over and over again. I've found with a RAMDisk the load times are much faster due to there being no extra hardware in the way to limit data flow. As the RAMDisk fragments it does affect the speed, but even fragmented the overall performance is still better then it being on a harddrive.