Cache Size

Is there any reason why they limit it to 1GB ?

why IS is limited to 1gb?

Probably because...
& this is totally hypothetical...

IF you had a larger cashe than 1gig the system would be spending an enormous time searching for the textures stored on your hard drive to pull and present which would counter the purpose of the cashe itself.. To store and load textures quickly in places youve previously visited.

Example: Take a deck of cards and pull out the "Jack of Hearts". Now do this in 4 more decks of cards. On the 5th deck, leave the "Jack of Hearts". Shuffle all the cards together.
Imagine the decks of cards represents GIGs of cashe. Its easier to find that card in 1 deck then out of 5 decks of cards.. get it? I dunnno.. need more coffee..

Just a guess.

-Tabitha

I'm fairly sure that there was a viewer sometime last year that allowed for a larger cache, maybe up to 5Gb, possibly one of the First Look viewers. I think it was changed back to 1Gb because in practice the larger cache caused the viewer to be very slow at opening, and didn't have much impact on how well SL ran, possibly because it was actually quicker to download stuff from SL than for your pc to search through the enormous cache to find it. That's based on a hazy memory of a blog post at the time they reduced the cache so may not be accurate.

I used the debug setting to set mine to 4GB

I also have a fast partition on a separate hard drive to keep it fast.

Ctrl-alt-D
Client->Debug settings
enter cachesize

enter 4000 for 4GB

The max is 4.8 GB?
I know it's less than 5GB

There was a client with 10 gig cache, but removed cause they said it caused issues or something (didnt see any diffrence myself)

It sucks for you if you meet someone inworld who has a larger cache than you, because he requests the data from the server, before, or instead of, you!

Big caches help on the front end (if you clear your cache like I do with every log in) but don't do a thing for you after you are in world and doing anything. That actually can slow things down if the cache size is too large (hardly noticable though).......access time involved in your computer's searching. I used to have my cache at the max but lowered it to about 400 megs. I think it helped a little but not much at all. Depends on a lot of things like the processor speed of you computer and how fast your CPU can access your hard drive..........and whether or not your cache is on the same drive as your SL is. It's all about time.........in very small increments I might add. Big caches, small caches.........not much difference really. The proformance of your CPU and GPU have so much more potential for loading textures or anything quickly in SL.

If cache textures were sorted somehow with a system, any decent machine could be able to find textures pretty quick

we had 10 along time ago near thefirst first looks clients. Its was crazy But ehhee it ws fun

The cache will be a lot more useful when it can properly cache objects instead of re-downloading them all the time. At least having the large cache reduces the number of times images are downloaded.

Not everyone has a T3 internet connection.
I'm lucky if my 3G cable modem gets 300K

Note: I've never seen the cache directory grow larger than 800meg even with the setting larger. In fact I see it removing images and re-downloading them at times.

It would be nice if there was a debug setting to turn off cache management all together.