Re: Disc cache worth it?

Peter Young, on 23 Jun, wrote:

> I've been using the disc cache on RISC OS 2.19, ARMini, and I seem to have
> found some downsides to it, and I wonder if (a) I'm doing it correctly and
> (b) if it's worth the occasional faster opening of some sites.
>
> If I load, for instance, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/ as the first site of a
> session, it loads maybe a little faster, but then I get intermittent
> hourglass activity for sometimes up to thirty seconds, during which I
> can't do anything else. There are several other sites, for instance
> Wikipedia home page, which do the same. And the next day the same happens.

I have found much the same, a really good example of this is the Daily
Mail's heavy weight site.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/index.html

Writes to the Raspberry Pi's SD Card are so slow that !Cache is not going to
be good news on it. It is better with !Cache on a Fat32 harddisc connected
to the Pi and on the Iyonix but is still an issue.

Overall I was not persuaded that the cache results is any meaningful speed
up and could even slow things up, not just on the Raspberry Pi but also on
the Iyonix and VRPC on a Windows 7 laptop with an SSD.

> Looking in !Cache, which is in !Boot.!Resources, I find that in the
> Caches.Default.NetSurf directory there are currently 1933 files, totalling
> 22449384 bytes. Is this to be expected, as I don't use NetSurf a huge
> amount? I've already excluded this directory from my daily backup, which
> has been taking a lot longer since I started using !Cache.

A lot of stuff is cached and the default maximum cache size is 1GB. It's not
worth backing up, it's transient data that expires in a default of 28 days.

I have uninstalled !Cache.
--
David Pitt