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To: mr.mark who wrote (20912)6/22/2001 11:26:50 AM
From: PMS Witch  Respond to of 110652
 
Thanks to Mark, some new information has come to my attention. Consequently, I must alter a previous recommendation.

In earlier posts, #reply-15722940 and #reply-15724820, I suggested removing the MaxFileCache setting from the [Vcache] section of the SYSTEM.INI file. In that post, I claimed this would allow Windows to assign memory more efficiently.

Mark’s recent post, #reply-15980489, pointed out that Windows has a somewhat compromised ability to handle systems with enormous RAM. In short, Windows consumes finite resources to manage memory, and abundant physical memory will exhaust those resources. The problem lies in file caching. Windows selects file cache sizes based on available memory, and if sufficient memory is available, Windows will choke itself.

This applies to those machines with Windows ME, SE, 98, 95, and 3.11 with more than 512 meg of RAM. Machines with less RAM, and machines with Windows NT, 2000, and XP, are not effected.

The solution, as addressed by the Microsoft Knowledge base, support.microsoft.com is to limit Windows’ file cache size through the MaxFileCache entry in the [Vcache] section of the SYSTEM.INI file to 524288 or less. (536,870,912 bytes = 524,288 kilobytes = 512 megabytes)

Fortunately, few machines will have such large RAM combined with older operating systems. For the few that do, this correction requires little effort.

Cheers, PW.

P.S. My system has 384meg RAM. Throughout my experimenting with file caching, I needed extremely disk intensive tests to detect even the smallest changes in efficiency at the settings’ edges. I doubt anyone would notice any difference between a 512meg cache and a 1gig or larger cache doing real work.

P.P.S. I think, but I’m not certain, that Windows has both MaxFileCache and MinFileCache set to some value by default. Maybe someone more certain about the matter will post the answer.