Tuesday, 24 June 2014

Re: Disc cache worth it?

On 24 Jun 2014 Vincent Sanders <vince@netsurf-browser.org> wrote:

> Although this reply is to Peter it applies to all the subsequent
> discussion.

> Firstly, as I did memntion in my original mail this feature is new and
> not tuned yet so may have adverse behaviour on some systems. Please do
> not draw any conclusions about the usefulness or otherwise of this
> feature from *development* snapshots.

> If you want stable behaviour the 3.1 release should be used. It may
> well turn out that this feature is simply unsuitable for RISC OS but
> we are at the beginning of a long road.

> As we have seen with the issues around !Cache and now with general
> perfomance, the challenges of building a cache suitable for use across
> many systems are not inconsiderable

[snip very interesting bits, but a lot of which goes right over my
head!]

> In summary, the cache:

> - Is still in development.

> - Is not a panacea and will not benefit everyone.

> - Is a compromise trade, and it seems for some systems with slow disc
> it is literally faster to retrieve from network than from local
> storage.

> - Is likely to be very large to be effective as the source web pages
> are large.

> - Can be disabled by setting its size to zero.

> I will look into adding a heuristic to disable or at least tune the
> cache writeout if it detects it is exceeding the available disc
> bandwidth.

Many thanks for this, and I did realise that it's still rather a test
feature and a compromise, but I just wondered whether I was doing
things right, and I'm glad I am. I'm also glad the my logfile was of
interest.

I'll stick with it (like many people of my age, I find I get more
patient as I get older), and will await developments with interest.

Best wishes,

Peter.

--
Peter Young (zfc W) and family
Prestbury, Cheltenham, Glos. GL52, England
http://pnyoung.orpheusweb.co.uk
pnyoung@ormail.co.uk

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