Increasing Performance Through Cache Optimization

Caching is meant to accelerate a system's operating system. When files are read, they are transferred from the hard disk to the main memory. This is because accessing data stored in the main memory can be done a lot faster than accessing data stored on a hard disk. The operating system is responsible for transferring those files between the hard disk and the main memory, optimally balancing this process for peak performance.

Caching Problems in Windows

The Windows operating system executes its read and write operations with the help on an integrated cache management system. However, this system is not always helpful in increasing overall performance. Often some file operations reserve large segments of memory for the file cache, leaving less memory available for running applications. As a result, additional requests to save data to memory lead to the storing of less active data to the Windows page file (swapping). At the same time, it is also possible that programs experiencing errors require even more memory resources, decreasing the size of the file cache and potentially leading to system crashes. In a case such as this one, Windows has no defined minimum file cache size.

This behavior is paradoxical to the actual purpose of the file cache, leading to substantially reduced performance and instability. Only up until recently it was not even possible for users to influence this behavior because Windows did not have any standard mechanisms for this purpose.