| What Are The Optimal Values? That's
the question that has been bothering many people, including yours truly. Generally, it has
been accepted that the optimal Max value would be 1/4 of the system RAM. So, for a 64MB
system, the optimal MaxFileCache value should be 16MB, which corresponds to a value of
16MB x 1024 = 16384KB.
You can set any value for the MinFileCache. It's generally thought that a system should
have a disk cache size of at least 1/8 of the system RAM. However, I would recommend
leaving it alone. Why? Let's say you open up a memory intensive application or game and
you need more free RAM. If you did not set anything for MinFileCache, Win9x can free it by
cutting some from the disk cache. But if you set MinFileCache to the same value as
MaxFileCache, Win9x would simply ignore it and use the swapfile instead.
You can set the MinFileCache value lower than MaxFileCache and thus avoid the above
mentioned problem but it does present some inflexibility when Win9x needs to resize the
VCache in times of need, especially if the MinFileCache size is large.
In any case, the values of both MinFileCache and MaxFileCache should be in kilobytes
but when you write it down in the system.ini, just type in the
number like the example above. DO NOT type in KB after the numbers.
Are They Still Valid For Win98?
Well, I'm not even sure if they are valid for Win95! That's because no one has bothered
to do any extensive benchmarking to confirm that manually setting the vcache values will
help the system perform better. But I remember that the system (64MB) was more responsive
in Win95 after I set the vcache settings manually.
In any case, Windows 98 has brought with it many changes under the hood. The virtual
cache system would almost definitely have been tweaked for better performance. Hence, the
question arises - should we manually set the vcache values in Win98 as we have done in
Win95? Let's find out. |
