Romex Software Forum

VTOLfreak wrote: ↑Mon Jul 28, 2025 6:54 pm

tverweij wrote: ↑Tue Jul 15, 2025 5:31 pm

VTOLfreak wrote: ↑Tue Jul 08, 2025 12:17 am Unless they come up with some cool new features, I don't really see a future for Primocache. Sorry.

Well, name the features ...
(and remember it is a block caching device, so folder or process inclusion / exclusion won't happen)

• Compression on the cache so it can hold more data
• Memory ballooning to force the OS to use said compressed cache in memory.
• Some form of tiered caching like a second-tier eviction cache.
• Adaptive caching policy, not blindly cache the latest used data. (ZFS style for example)
• Pool based cache allocation. Just throw a bunch of SSDs at it to use for caching and let it distribute data across the cache pool.
• Predictive caching. Keep track of access patterns and preload data that is likely needed in the cache.
• Native support for connecting to iSCSI/RBD volumes, avoids going through the windows iSCSI-initiator.
• Windows cluster support for the server edition. Add the cache disk and Primocache service to a role with a cluster shared volume so the cache can move with a failover.
• Remote memory caching - Use multiple machines to add even more memory and cache disks. (Upsell it as the cluster edition)
• RDMA support for said remote caching.
• Expose cached volume as storage-class-memory to avoid filesystem overhead in the OS. (call it virtual NVDIMM support)

That's 5 minutes of brainstorming. I could probably think of some more stuff.
Instead, they have not added anything noteworthy for the better part of a decade.

I’d also really like to see compression and predictive caching implemented. The compression idea could potentially leverage the built-in Windows RAM compression feature, which might make it more efficient. Last year, the vendor mentioned a major 5.0 release estimated for Q1 2025, but it’s still delayed and pretty quiet on updates. Hopefully, some of these features make it into that release!