Looking for some cache management application
Posted: Sun Oct 04, 2009 7:51 pm
I remember that back in 2005 or so, there was a freeware standalone executable that could, among other things, compact/defragment the computer's RAM, or swap out applications not in use. Any ideas?
The problem I'm trying to solve is that on a Windows XP Pro SP2 laptop with 3G of RAM, the cache seems to get busted after I open a number of memory-hungry applications (Firefox, Outlook), even if I close them. By "busted" I mean that disk reads are no longer cached.
Example: If I just boot up Windows and start Excel, it grinds the hard drive for 3-4 seconds, then loads. If I quit it and start it again, it loads
up almost instantly. All the files it needs to read off disk are cached.
Now if I start Firefox with 10-15 tabs and do the same Excel test, it grinds the hard drive for 3 seconds every time. I wouldn't mind this about Excel, but when I'm developing and compiling programs with large dependency chains, it's painful to wait every time for half a minute until everything is read off the disk, instead of just a few seconds if reads were cached.
Does anyone have an idea what's causing this?
I already applied the hack #4 (Kernel Paging and Cache Tuning) from http://kadaitcha.cx/performance.html to increase the cache size, but that didn't help. Also, I posted the question to microsoft.public.windowsxp.general but got mostly off-topic replies.
The problem I'm trying to solve is that on a Windows XP Pro SP2 laptop with 3G of RAM, the cache seems to get busted after I open a number of memory-hungry applications (Firefox, Outlook), even if I close them. By "busted" I mean that disk reads are no longer cached.
Example: If I just boot up Windows and start Excel, it grinds the hard drive for 3-4 seconds, then loads. If I quit it and start it again, it loads
up almost instantly. All the files it needs to read off disk are cached.
Now if I start Firefox with 10-15 tabs and do the same Excel test, it grinds the hard drive for 3 seconds every time. I wouldn't mind this about Excel, but when I'm developing and compiling programs with large dependency chains, it's painful to wait every time for half a minute until everything is read off the disk, instead of just a few seconds if reads were cached.
Does anyone have an idea what's causing this?
I already applied the hack #4 (Kernel Paging and Cache Tuning) from http://kadaitcha.cx/performance.html to increase the cache size, but that didn't help. Also, I posted the question to microsoft.public.windowsxp.general but got mostly off-topic replies.