Fancycache issue Topic is solved

[Manny]

i can see that there are xml, html and other non executable files in my cache, that is the exactly what i meant
before that it was caching only exe and dll files

Reading only cache also a bit dangerous, because it is not 100% stable and can produce BSODs, so even in that mode i would NOT recommend to install it by default to any pc. As for me this tool not for home user at all.

[SnowReborn]

memory caching has nothing to do with prefetch, I did testing for quiet some time with windows memory cache, on any game , I MEAN ANYGAME, load once, and reload the stage or level you just load , you will see your hard drive is light is completely off, which the game itself is reading data directly from your ram, memory cache.

[SnowReborn]

What i mean in this thread by Windows cache is this http://puu.sh/1zh0j

[Manny]

memory caching has nothing to do with prefetch, I did testing for quiet some time with windows memory cache, on any game , I MEAN ANYGAME, load once, and reload the stage or level you just load , you will see your hard drive is light is completely off, which the game itself is reading data directly from your ram, memory cache.

Then I don't really understand what you meant in first post But the last one looks right for me

[Violator]

memory caching has nothing to do with prefetch, I did testing for quiet some time with windows memory cache, on any game , I MEAN ANYGAME, load once, and reload the stage or level you just load , you will see your hard drive is light is completely off, which the game itself is reading data directly from your ram, memory cache.

You wont to see that with games like GW2, LOTRO and SWTOR, neither with any other games that got extremely large texture files or that stream from one huge file from disk, even a file memory cache has it's limits there.
Block level caching can do something there by caching the most frequently used blocks, or as already mentioned, adding the files to a ramdisk and mklink them.
Both caching methods have been proven to give a significant boost on load times over what even a tweaked windows file and memory cache can provide, most noticeable with HDD's thou.
Superfetch has everything todo with memory caching desktop apps.

What do you mean with memory caching, and are we talking Windows 7 + 8?

[dustyny]

Honestly guys you have 0% reason to worry about all the various caching mechanisms, the only people that need to be concerned with them are developers.

Violator is right as of now there best way to handle extremely large textures is to load the files on to a RAMdisk and use mklink on them. If/when Fancycache has persistent caching this will become a non-issue.

Windows 7/8 does not cache ANY file, you can check for yourself: http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/win_prefetch_view.html

Prefetch and Superfetch are a different type of caching mechanism and accomplish a totally different objective from what Fancycache does. Prefetch and Superfetch will cache ANY data or code, it doesn't care, the only thing it cares about is how frequently its accessed (to determine if it should be preloaded).

The prefetch & superfetch data can be found in the memory management cache, which is what you see in the Task manager performance tab. Keep in mind this is a shared cache and it used by a number of systems/processes.

Prefetch - When a Windows system boots, a large number of files need to be read into memory and processed. Often different segments of the same file are loaded at different times from different parts of the disk (if using a HDD). Because of this the OS will perform numerous reads of small bit of data which is very inefficient. The prefetcher works by watching what code and data is accessed during the boot process (including the NTFS Master File Table), and records a trace file of the activity pattern. Future boots can then use the information recorded in the trace to preload the code/data in one large read which is more effective. This speeds up boot time even on fast SSDs (small reads are always slow). Application prefetching works in a similar fashion, but is instead localized to a single application's startup. Only the first 10 seconds of activity are monitored

Superfetch - Is an update to prefetch it works similarly but from what I understand the two are still used (can't break that backwards compatibility).

http://www.osnews.com/story/21471/Super ... orks_Myths
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Page_cache

[Violator]

Prefetch and Superfetch are a different type of caching mechanism and accomplish a totally different objective from what Fancycache does. Prefetch and Superfetch will cache ANY data or code...

The tool should show what SuperFetch holds too, hence why I linked it.
SuperFetch is an upgraded version or you can call it extension of XP's PreFetch btw. , but it's pointless with fast SSD's, I did run some boot time and application load time tests with it enabled and disabled, it does not even give me a one second difference, so MS engineers had their point by disabling it after certain performance criteria's are met with a SSD disk as the system disk.
I remember that it did generate a lot of I/O on the system part of my HDD raid back when I used Vista, so I disabled it to get rid of the annoying spinning noise and constant led blinking, and neither there could I see any drop in performance.
Completely different story with a 5400rpm laptop drive thou
Also, it seems only apply to the system drive, so that is probably the main reason why I never see gaming benefits from the technique, my games got their own dedicated disk.