chrisdab Posted May 30, 2009 Report Share Posted May 30, 2009 this option is under Preferences/Advanced/Disk Cache/Is the consensus that this option should be unchecked? I searched old threads about this and it seems admins suggested to uncheck this. I do find though that this option does save me alot of cache memory if I set my cache to high level ie. 128MB.So does it work now as it should or are there other issues with leaving this option checked? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Switeck Posted May 30, 2009 Report Share Posted May 30, 2009 If you check that, there's probably no point settings the cache larger than the default of 32 MB UNLESS your download/upload speeds are very high -- like 1 MB/sec! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
chrisdab Posted May 30, 2009 Author Report Share Posted May 30, 2009 Yes it gets high, I had to set to 128MB because my write cache was overflowing at 64MB.Edit: so I am guessing its ok to set mine to 128MB and checkbox reduce memory usage. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jewelisheaven Posted May 30, 2009 Report Share Posted May 30, 2009 How fast are you downloading? MiByte/sec ?? @ that size it sounds like your hardware can't keep up. Are the controllers set to DMA or PIO? Check Device Manager. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
chrisdab Posted May 30, 2009 Author Report Share Posted May 30, 2009 It got high initially when downloading a 50+GB torrent, with caching of disk writes going up to around 70MB, then then settling down to 1-9MB which seems typical. So my goal was to have the disk cache size at 128MB to handle any peaks but also to enable "Reduce memory usage when cache is not needed" to free up memory when caching of disk writes is low. If there is no issue with "Reduce memory usage when cache is not needed," then I will feel more comfortable with checking that box to free up more memory.I download at 2.2 MB/s.Please let me know if there are issues with checking this box. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jewelisheaven Posted May 31, 2009 Report Share Posted May 31, 2009 It isn't really a usability issue when downloading. Usually people report functionality issues when using the cache as storage for uploads. With large files and large cache size it's possible to serve file(s) from RAM, however with the option "reduce usage" ticked, you may lose the cache, causing buffering again. On rare/niche content this may cause unnecessary overhead in limited conditions.Many people push cache to the 32-bit per-process limit of ~ 1400 MiB... so 128 shouldn't be a problem.Did you get a chance to check the DMA setting? Even at that speed, it should be able to handle r/w.. unless you do more than just torrent on the PC? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
chrisdab Posted May 31, 2009 Author Report Share Posted May 31, 2009 I like to keep my upload maxed at 500 kB/s, so if I click "reduce memory usage", does that effect my upload speed? I am not able to understand what happens when I have to buffer my cache again. Is upload briefly effected or continuously effected if this situation occurs?I had checked the DMA setting the last time you asked me too. I am not sure whether I am looking at the wrong thing though. I looked at the section "IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers" and for my SATA drives, I have Serial ATA Generation 1-1.5G. For my one PATA drive, I have Ultra DMA 5 - Ultra 100. Thats the only instance of DMA I see. I use my SATA drives for Utorrent though. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jewelisheaven Posted May 31, 2009 Report Share Posted May 31, 2009 Well disk performance suffers during the rebuffer, elsewhere/in uT, whatever creates the contention.There shouldn't be any decreased output though as long as you're buffering the data faster than you're piping it out to peers.Yeah, UDMA 5 is good. As long as they don't say "current transfer" and "PIO" is what you're checking for. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GTHK Posted May 31, 2009 Report Share Posted May 31, 2009 Long as the SATA drive doesn't read as PIO. I assume you're using appropriate controller drivers since you're getting SATA generation instead of DMA readings. What drivers are you using? Got NCQ enabled on the SATA drive (if available)? Those might help.SATA generation 2 is faster though, but your drive and motherboard must support it as well as be fast enough to take advantage of it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
chrisdab Posted May 31, 2009 Author Report Share Posted May 31, 2009 I'm sure everything's fine. I'll just keep it enabled. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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