So, what's the optimal chunksize for the disk cache? What chunksize value would be a good balance between increasing overhead and cache efficiency? From the e-mails I keep receiving, this is a question that has been bothering many people. The default value set by Microsoft is 512 bytes. But unlike the other settings for the vcache, there is no rule of the thumb yet on the optimal value for a chunksize.

I could be wrong but as far as I know, no one has ever done any extensive testing of the various chunksizes in order to determine the performance difference between different chunksizes. My attempts to elicit information on chunksize from Microsoft has so far gotten me nothing at all. But the extremely poor Internet connection that I'm stuck with now is to be blamed for this, more than anything else.

In any case, I finally decided to test 11 different chunksizes - 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024, 2048, 4096 and 8192 bytes. That should cover just about all the bases, I hope. Now, let's see what I actually did to test the effect of the various chunksizes.