What good is the cache?

Seriously, what's it do? I leave a place and come back 2 minutes later, and everything has to reload again. I've set my cache to the smallest size and the largest size and seen absolutely no change in performance whatsoever. Aren't caches supposed to eliminate having to reload things that are already on my computer? Well if that's the case then why does EVERYTHING still have to reload for me, all the time?!

eeh if im not off, you dont re download the textures, so you do save bandwidth, but you sure need to rerender the "scene" you are looking at, wich is the slow part <.<

1 gig cache isnt much... SL can do tons of gigs a day :<

Clearly, there is a lot of room for improvement with caching. I too have trouble seeing a significant benefit from the current caching scheme. And when I joined SL a year ago, I remember seeing some posts that indicated that setting the cache too large could actually slow down performance.

One thing that I've wondered about is RAM. I have 2gigs of RAM which SL is barely using.

The LOD handlers in the rendering engine are fubar. I'm having LAND textures LOD drop. I think the problem is in the AGP memory management portion of the client.

I think the same way Shack, I also have 2 gigs of ram, I wish there was someway to put that gig of cache in the ram instead of the hard drive.

I need to upgrade to 3giga soon. 1 giga is just not enough anymore. But in all fairness there is a few note cards goign around that says set your limits high and you wil not lag.OMG this is far from true. I am on a SLI MB. and 1 giga is not enough

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I figured this out yesterday and it does improve things alot. Keep in mind this is a cheap fix and is by no means a replacement for better coding or at the very least better memory options. SL doesn't use all available ram, probly so other system processes can operate more smoothly without affecting SL. Honestly LL should put in a virtual cache for those of us with large quanities of RAM (like 768 and up).

OMG! I'm having acid flashbacks from the 80's!

LOL, I remember RAM disks from DOS. Well, it's a good idea. I might just do it even though it is a complete hack.

well, it certainly feels like you ARE re-downlaoding the textures? I spend 80% of my time in SL "at home", and there are only a very manageable number of textures involved there. Yet each time I log in, everything is completely transparent and has to rezz in while the bandwidth meter jumps to 1000kb on the upper right corner.

If you do Alt+2 (or is it Alt+3? I keep forgetting) you can get a graph that will show you the processes and how much usage they're taking up. From this, I've noticed instead of updating the geometry, it's re-rendering it over and over again. Now, I'm far from a genius with this, but in my hypothesis this would indicate that rather than being cached, it's having to reload the geometry. Now, I'm not too firm on this guess, since we havent seen a huge bandwidth hit to SL, but it makes me wonder if geometry is not caching right.

One answer to the question posed by the title of this thread is that the cache folder holds all the sound clips we hear. They have a UUID style name with the file extension DSF, on Windows systems at least. I assume the DSF extension stands for Digital Sound File. These files are apparently deleted when the program closes, requiring them to be downloaded anew despite their including such commonplace sounds and footsteps and collision sounds.

While the program is running, you can select all the DSF from the cache folder, then open a command window and rename *.DSF to *.WAV. Then you can play the sounds, find the ones you like, and rename to a sensible name instead of a UUID style name, upload them and use them in SL.

If you can't some some other source for Badger Badger clips, that is.