October 2004
Intermediate to advanced
304 pages
7h 44m
English
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Hack #66. Speed Up Windows with VCACHE
If you absolutely must stick with Windows 9x or Me the least you can do is give your system this free performance-boosting tweak to your Windows disk cache.
The Windows operating system creates and maintains its own read-ahead disk-caching service to help speed things up, but Windows itself does not give you any direct control over VCACHE. Instead, you have to dig into the C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM.INI file with a text editor to set the caching service to your liking.
When setting a value for disk caching, you have to balance the amount of RAM to be used for programs and data with the RAM set aside for disk caching. If a lot of RAM is assigned to disk caching, that leaves less for programs and data and Windows will use the swapfile more, which will slow things down. If you assign too little RAM for disk caching, disk operations may be a bit slower but Windows may use the swapfile less, thus keeping performance up a bit.
There is also another balancing act going on here: do you let Windows waste time looking in the cache for data that is not there, which can happen if the cache is too large, or give it less space to look through so it can get directly to the disk drive as quickly as possible? The best approach is to have just enough memory allocated for some caching benefit and not so much that we cheat our programs and Windows.
Fortunately most disk drives have between 256 KB and 8 MB of cache dedicated to data caching to and from the disk drive interface. ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.