1. Add a menu with text entries. Having to remember what little pictures do for each app is such a hassle and I always prefer to turn off toolbars and use "text buttons" organized in menus instead which clearly state what they will do instead of having to wait for the Tooltips to tell me what cryptic little picture icons will do.
2. Add custom configurable columns - would be nice to see "Total Read", "Cached Read", "Total Write", "Deferred Blocks" in the column table view without having to click on each entry individually. Also the font and icon size of the information in the column view can be slightly reduced so that it can fit more data and give a more meaningful "one-look glance view"
robertcollier4 wrote:would be nice to see "Total Read", "Cached Read", "Total Write", "Deferred Blocks" in the column table view without having to click on each entry individually.
One of our worries is that such design may increase CPU overload if users set up many cache tasks.
I'd second robertcollier's comment about unlabelled buttons (make their text labels a configurable on/off option so those with small screens can lose the labels to save space once they're familiar with them though).
My biggest criticism though is with the cache hit graph - it is far too short term to be useful (and this applied to FancyCache also). A better option would be to make the sampling period user-adjustable (5 seconds by default) and to have the graph use one pixel for each sample period (so a 120-pixel wide graph would cover the last 10 minutes at default sampling rates). This would allow users to decide between short or long-term monitoring and, with a 5-second default, should lessen the CPU overhead.
Aside from these points though, I think PrimoCache is a significant improvement over FancyCache (not just in name alone!). The UI does look better and performance (when PrimoCache is working) seems better. Being able to use invisible memory only for caching is a big plus for 32-bit system users.
Modern trend for UI is simplicity, but the toolbar buttons currently consist of two entities - background image of a brick (the first 7 buttons) and the function itself, the latter being visually indiscernible from the background.
Possibility to just have a window that shows stats, without the graph or list of drives?
Again, great program... intel's srt annoyed me in how I didn't know what it was doing.
It also seemed to use LRU, things I used a lot seemed to get forced out of cache!
Nevermind for UI "simplicity" but here are some suggestions :
- It would be great to consult the most accessed files cache list ( according to their size desc, or hits desc )
.... pure curiosity, my girlfriend has a 60% hits rate, while I'm on 15%, is it meaning I'm spending too much memory for the cache ?
- Determine some extensions or filename ( using regex ? ) to skip or prioritize in the process
- Have a flexible ram allocation for the cache ( meaning : If I have 4go ram free, allowing the program to manage 75% of it, then dump Least Accessed Files for ram allocation, when needed )
