HDD "caches"

[DMan]

I was wondering, why is it that when I'm in the middle of say my Quake game does my HDD suddenly go into a flurry of activity (cuz it starts making all this noise and stuff) and slows down gameplay greatly? This will last usually about 10 seconds but it's happened on an older drive of mine and took a minute or two to return to normal. It wasn't doing this before but is slowly starting to again. Do I need to defragment my drive or something?

Thanks.

[Kronix]

Usually when I have this problem, it's because I'm entering a new part of the map and the computer has to load up a large amount of textures and/or 3d data, like when you hit a new level in Half-Life.

[BBA]

There are many causes for this. Here goes:

1. Not enough system memory. The problem is that it will need to shuffle data from system ram to the virtual memory swap file on the hard drive. With Quake2, if you have less than about 80M of ram, this is a problem.

2. Dynamic swap file and file cache settings. Windows likes to optimize it's swap file size and it's filecache size, and will arbitrarily do this even while you play games or do some other high cpu usage task.

You can correct this by setting the virtual memory setting to about 150M for the minimum and maximum from system properties. Set the file cache by inserting 2 lines in the Sistem.ini file (just type "sysedit" from the run line) under the [VCACHE] heading mine is this:

[vcache]
minfilecache=50000
maxfilecache=50000


I decided on my cache file sizes by selecting about 1/4 of my ram size ( I have 192M ram).

3. MS Office installs an app called "Find Fast" that is only of benefit if you have over 5000 document files on your PC that you access regularly. It will, however, completely scan your PC's hard drives every 2 hours unless you disable it. Do this from control panels Find Fast icon, click the findfast task and select to remove this task or disable or whatever option it says from the actions menu (it's been a while}.

That should pretty much do it for you!

BBA


[This message has been edited by BBA (edited 07-10-99).]

[buitenb]

bba there are truths in your mesage but i got
160 p100 ram and for me i got :
minfilecache=16278
maxfilecache=32578
generated with cacheman works best all the ram contains junk with so large cache !
i dont know what you do with your system
but for playin games it is to large that 50 megs
i fool around with photoshop 5.0 and that
kind of stuff and games like unreal an quake II and i have no shaking experiences with this !

[BBA]

The reason is that I still have 141M free ram on top of the file cache and opening any window or program instanlty snaps open. The reason it is static ( min=max) is to keep windows from re-sizing it while I play Q2. I use Photoshop4 and Office 2000 sometimes and those too work faster than with the filecache settings at a lower value.

BBA

[DMan]

Ok, so if I have only 64MB of ram what settings do you recommend?

PS. I actually don't play single player Quake so loading between levels isn't an issue. It just happens in the middle of a multiplayer game online.