Virtual Memory &cacheman

[pakqua]

If anyone knows HoW to use it let us know..I have less then 256k ..(128) memory...And at 42 (LOL) I am not computer litterate..(Geez shoulda asked my 18 yr old)..and how to set it up.TY!

[sprint]

I'm bored, in a bad mood, so I figured if I answer this it might give me better karma for rest of the day.  Its really very easy, nothing to it, but I going to type an answer from Oct 2001 issue of MaxiumPC, page 29.

IMPROVE YOUR SWAP FILE

" To increase performance durning swap file use, many power users lock the file to a fixed, contiguous portion of the hard drive.  This prevents Windows from constantly resizing the swap file, whick results in the file becoming heavily fragmented and spayed over the expanse of your hard drive,which, in turn, slows access times.

The previous convention was to set the swap file to twice your amount of RAM. Thats a good place to start, but everybody has different needs.  To figure out how large your swap file needs to be, fire up System Monitor(Programs>Accessories>System Tools). If it wasn't selected when you installed Windows go to Start>Settings>ControlPanel>Add/Remove Programs>Windows Setup> System Tools and install it.  Once you have a good idea of how large your swap file gets, click My Computer/Properties/Performance tab and then Vitural Memory.  Disable virtual memory, then reboot your machine.  You should be warned that in configuration with 64MB or less of RAM, this could stop Windows from booting.  Once you've rebooted, degragment your hard drive.  Once the defrag is complete, go back to Vitual Memory and click "Let me specify my own virtual memory settings."

If you have betweeb 32MB and 128MB of memory, set you minimium swap file size to twice the amount you obseved through the System Monitor.  Leave the maxium setting alone.

If you  have more than 128MB of memory, a swap file set to a minimium and maximium between 250MB and 300MB should be more enough."

Whew.

sprint

[sprint]

Here's a couple more Tweaks  ...

These settings are in System.ini. By default, windows creates the [vcache] section, but leaves the entries under it blank. Just add the entries as shown (capitalization is important here) and reboot for them to take
effect. For your system with 128Mb I'd recommend the following:
 
[vcache]
MinFileCache=16384            
MaxFileCache=32768
ChunkSize=512

And this to your 386Enh section
                 
[386Enh]
ConservativeSwapfileUsage=1


sprint

PS: Go to Start >Run >type in box system.ini
    type in above changes >reboot

[sprint]

pakqua Just curious .. did any of the tweaks help?

sprint

[Don]

Hey Sprint:
Good information. Want to increase your karma today?
How would you set Vcache etc for a system with 384 MB of Ram?
eg. Min file ; Max file and chunk size numbers?

I have Cacheman also and do not think I have made full use of its capabilities.

And wouldn't I be able to set these things within the Cacheman Program rather than going into system ini etc?

[weazel]

Edit the system.ini file.

Set vcache to 25% of system memory. My swap file is 1/2 of system memory.

Chunk size at 512kb has performed best in all the benchmarks I've ran or read about.

Cacheman will slow your PC down if you choose the wrong profile, it also will load at every boot unless you disable it.

Here are some of my system.ini tweaks.

[386Enh]
MinPagingFileSize=131072
MaxPagingFileSize=131072
ConservativeSwapfileUsage=1
32BitDiskAccess=on
DMABufferSize=64
PageBuffers=32


[vcache]
MinFileCache=16384
MaxFileCache=65536
ChunkSize=512

If you want to seriously tweak your PC go to axcel216, this guy knows more about Windoze than the people who coded it.  

[sprint]

For 256 to 384Mb I multiply it all by 0.50
 
For over 384, I keep it at 384 x .25 x 1024 x .5 = 49152...
(which is getting pretty stinkin huge, no sense going any larger no matter how much ram you have)
 
For the Min amount, just halve whatever the Max amount is.
 
Chunksize is always 512. (In fact, that's the
default)

[vcache]
MinFileCache=24576
MaxFileCache=49152
ChunkSize=512

Vcache is your windows managed virtual disk cache. It resides in RAM and has nothing to do with Virtual Memory..... that's a specially set aside region on the disk that is otherwise known as the Page File, or swapfile. The two are used in completely different ways.
 
Virtual Memory is the reverse of a RAMDisk... where RAM is set aside to simulate a disk. In this case, disk space is set aside to simulate more RAM. Once RAM starts to get full of things, windows swaps things out of RAM to that file
region on the disk in "Pages"... hence the name... and thus make more room in RAM for data that is more current or being accessed more frequently than that it "paged to disk". Ever get a Blue Screen that was generated by a "page fault"? That's when windows goes to the pagefile to retrieve something it thought was there and it wasn't... or it was but was scrambled. By default, the pagefile region is sized on the fly... when windows needs more space it just grabs it at will, resulting in a brief pause in screen activity as
the disk goes nuts for a sec. The reason with make
a "static" pagefile with min and max sizes is to limit or eliminate this disk activity. If the min and max are the same, then there is no dynamic resizing of the pagefile going on. Just make sure it's big enough or windows is not going to
be happy.
 
Vcache is the disk cache. It's a region of RAM that the windows uses to read pieces of  recently used data on the disk. When windows needs something off the disk, it will look in the
cache first for it. If it's not there, then it will go to the disk for it. Likewise, when ever a disk write operation occurs, it is also written to the cache. By keeping recently used data in the cache, which is also the data that windows will
most likely need in the immediate future, disk
access is kept to a minimum and made more efficient. RAM access is orders of magnitude faster than disk access. The entries in system.ini what we typically do are to size the cache region of RAM manually, as windows default values are thought to be too small. If you make the cache
too big however, it can decrease performance
'cause you're tying up RAM that windows could use for other things.

My Virtual Memory is set 400 ..  BTW I have 384 Megs of Ram.

BTW I do agree with weazel  about
"Forget about Cacheman". And AXCEL is a good but hard read ... very heavy stuff