Minimising hard disk reads by playing with cache settings.

[rolls]

I constantly upload about 12 files (they vary) at 220kb/s

Now I have played with the caching settings and found slight gain going from 32mb read cache to 128mb read cache (I have plenty of ram)

I am averaging about 36% hit ratio on the cache and about 200-300B/s read according to resource monitor.

Now with 32mb cache I get about 300-400B/s read.

I have 'disable windows caching of disk reads' unticked, would this likely improve my performance even further?

I would happily set a 2gig cache (overnight when computer is not used) if it increased the hit ratio to 75%. Is there any way to do this?

Should I disable the windows caching or leave it enabled? My ultimate goal is to minimise hard drive reads to keep the noise down as the PC is in my room, also I'd like improve its life

[Ultima]

The user manual's description of the Disk Cache options tell you exactly which options decrease disk access. Less frequent disk access won't improve it's life by any noticeable amount -- it's disk spinup/spindown that causes more drive wear and tear.

[rolls]

I know which ones decrease it but to what extent, is adding 512mb of ram to the cache going to help at all?

[Ultima]

There's no absolute answer. It depends on how fast your connection is -- your first post is rather imprecise about units.

At any rate, if your connection is rated in the mbit/s for both upload and download, then cache sizes in the hundreds may be helpful in maintaining speed and preventing disk overload. Just keep in mind that there is a diminishing rate of return as you increase the cache size. As well, as far as I remember, µTorrent does not handle cache sizes over 1 GB well, so don't set anything above that.

[Switeck]

uTorrent is a 32 bit application, so both it, its variable space, AND its ram cache cannot total over 2 GB ram.

I've had the ram cache as high as 1700 MB before without problems, but I was running only about 5 torrents.

[Ultima]

Yeah, I know what the theoretical limits for 32-bit apps are, but I remember some users experiencing crashes when the cache size went above 1 GB. Maybe it was fixed -- don't know.

Scratch that, after some searching, it was indeed crashing over 2GB (and not 1GB) after all. Mixed up the numbers.

[rolls]

Ok thanks guys, I am currently seeding a 11gig torrent only and wanted to minimise disk access so I have temporarily increased the cache size to 1gig, will see how much it decreases the disk accessing the data.

[Switeck]

Make sure to DISABLE the cache settings that cause the cache to make itself smaller.