Although PalmTweak allows us to set as large a font cache as we want - literally limitless, we don't want to do that. Memory is a precious commodity in a Pocket PC. Even though you may get up to 32MB of RAM in a Pocket PC, you will soon find that 32MB of RAM isn't a lot. This is a stark contrast to PalmOS-based PDAs where 8MB goes a long way.

After all, a portion of the RAM will be used for running programs. In my case, about 10MB is always allocated to programs, leaving only about 22MB of RAM to store software and data. Small as Pocket PC software generally are (compared to PC bloatware), they add up. And don't forget those WMA files you keep onboard. You will want to reserve lots of space for them.

Other users with only 16MB Pocket PCs will have even less RAM to work with. With only 6-10MB of space to store data, every byte counts.

As space is a premium, you won't want to reserve too much space for font caching. After all, all it does is cache fonts! It doesn't do anything else. And let's not forget the law of diminishing returns. Doubling the font cache size won't double the font drawing speed. So, why waste so much precious RAM just for a font cache? A point will come when increasing the font cache just won't do enough to justify the loss of storage memory. 

What could be the optimal size for the font cache? Well, I don't have an idea, to be truthful. After all, I have barely a week's experience with my Pocket PC. However, I decided to benchmark its performance with the following choices of font cache size :-

• 8192 bytes (8KB) - default value
• 16384 bytes (16KB)
• 32768 bytes (32KB)
• 65536 bytes (64KB)
• 131072 bytes (128KB) 

Now, let's see what the benchmark results tell us! :)