how effective is read caching on L1?

[CosminNet]

been using win 7 x64 and notice that it actually puts to good use the ram that is not used by apps and mostly uses it for read caching. the perceived smoothness is really visibile. it also does some write caching but it's a lot less effective. i was wondering what are the benefits of using ram for read-only caching, using fancy cache? having write-caching with/without delays i understand as windows is conservative with caching writes. i see a lot of sense using L1 for write-caching (with lazy writes) and L2 for read-caching (extending on what windows already does). what is your take on this?

[Support]

Caching stragety mainly affect the cache hit rate.

Read/Write: when FC receives read requests, it load data into the cache if data is not cached before. While see write requests, FC also put write data into the cache for read requests which may happen later. If DeferWrite is off, these write data is also immediately written the harddisk. If DeferWrite is on, these write data will be written after certain delays.

Read-only: FC only handle read requests. It doesn't handle write requests, so the write data doesn't occupy cache space.
Write-only: FC only handle write requests. It doesn't handle read requests, so the read data doesn't occupy cache space.

Regarding L2 caching, we're studying new algorithm trying to improve the effective.

[CosminNet]

i was asking wether there is any improvement (over windows fs caching) using read-only caching using ram. let's say i use 1gig of ram for L1 and use read-only cache, is there any benefit on doing this over what windows already does?
when using FC read-only or r/w (with/whithout deffered writes) caching is it that we could have the same data in windows cache as well as in the L1 cache... effectively caching things twice and wasting memory?

[sparkler]

are you running a server ,crunching wu's or other i/o heavy activity or are you using it to try and improve the performance on your pc games??

[Support]

i was asking wether there is any improvement (over windows fs caching) using read-only caching using ram.

Well, you may refer to the "Why FancyCache" section in the following web page.
http://www.romexsoftware.com/en-us/fanc ... index.html

[CosminNet]

are you running a server ,crunching wu's or other i/o heavy activity or are you using it to try and improve the performance on your pc games??

i'm a software developer using visual studio's compile performance (the compile part is really write heavy) and whole os smoothness.

[CosminNet]

i was asking wether there is any improvement (over windows fs caching) using read-only caching using ram.

Well, you may refer to the "Why FancyCache" section in the following web page.
http://www.romexsoftware.com/en-us/fanc ... index.html

i actually missed this explanations even though i saw the page before . tnx for pointing it to me again.

FancyCache caches data on a logical block basis (offsets within a volume/disk) while windows cache manager caches on a virtual block basis (offsets within a file).

is there a benefit to this?

Some applications bypass the file-system level cache.

there are some but really few. can be really useful if you are in that particular case.

Windows caches all data, while FancyCache can cache on behalf of a specified volume/disk in which users are interested. Given same size of system memory, the latter has a higher hit-rate.

this can keep disk threashing away. in some cases it's really useful to have this focused caching. people who will use this will usually know what they are doing so this is a good point.

FancyCache can utilize the OS Invisible Memory on 32-bit Windows as a cache medium.

if you are in this situation is good but it probably pays more to move to 64bit os. in the case you cannot do that it can be useful

FancyCache can utilize SSD (Solid-state Drive) as a cache medium, as ReadyBoost does.

this is a big plus as i see a lot more sense using a small ssd (for cache) + big hdd, compared to a big ssd that costs a lot at least at this point in time. i know you intend to make L2 cache persistent between reboots so this is a big plus. if you also allow prefference towards reads or writes.
ps: i think the biggest part of the audience will understand/benefit/buy this app to use ssd caching. i would emphasize on this if i were u .

[sparkler]

are you running a server ,crunching wu's or other i/o heavy activity or are you using it to try and improve the performance on your pc games??

i'm a software developer using visual studio's compile performance (the compile part is really write heavy) and whole os smoothness.

then it would probably be more beneficial to use fancycache as a write cache with deferred write on freeing up the disk so it can service read requests rather than using it for read caching