[DancingDirty]

Hello and great thread!

Any news?

Also, because "Newest version: CacheFolder 1.0.1.zip" @post48 is unavailable, does anyone has that file to send it to me?

Thanks

 

[Techie007]

Thank you for bringing this thread to my attention! I have updated the links on all the posts. Sadly, UbuntuOne closed their excellent file sharing service, leaving my download links broken all over this site. They get repaired as people bring them to my attention.

You can download the latest version of CacheFolder.zip here.

 

[hak8or]

Did you sharing the source code with Darius510 result in anything, or is CacheFolder abandoned in terms of further development? What is it written in, since if it's in a language I know I would potentially take a jab at it to add some functionality (automatically upon bootup cache selectable files onto RAM, etc), assuming it's written in an Open Source friendly license (GPL/MIT/BSD/etc).

 

[Techie007]

Quote:

Originally Posted by hak8or

Did you sharing the source code with Darius510 result in anything...

I am not aware of anything coming from that.

Quote:

Originally Posted by hak8or

...is CacheFolder abandoned in terms of further development?

Not really; it's just that there isn't that much improvement to be made. If you have ideas, I can try to implement them. A couple ideas presented earlier go beyond my programming knowledge.

Quote:

Originally Posted by hak8or

What is it written in, since if it's in a language I know I would potentially take a jab at it to add some functionality (automatically upon bootup cache selectable files onto RAM, etc), assuming it's written in an Open Source friendly license (GPL/MIT/BSD/etc).

I wrote CacheFolder in Visual Basic 6. You can make it automatically cache certain files or folders to RAM on startup by creating a batch file, and putting it in the Startup folder. I have not considered anything license-wise for CacheFolder.

 

[Darius510]

Nah, I never really did much with it because porting it to a different version of VB is frankly beyond my skills.

 

[Darius510]

I dunno if you're interested in adding any new features (I still have the source code), but I've got a request. Is there any way you could make it so it stayed resident and monitored a folder (and subfolders) for an application launch? For instance point it at your steam games folder, then whenever a game is executed, preload that folder on a background thread? Might even be useful pointing it at C:\program files.That way you wouldn't have to make batch files or manage anything. I still use this tool all the time, it's super useful.

 

[Techie007]

    Just signed in and saw this.  Yes, that is quite possible, but I'll need more information to come up with an implementation.  I am not familiar with Steam.  Do Steam games appear as regular EXE Processes in Task Manager or Process Explorer?  Probably rather than update this program, I'd make an auto-launcher/GUI program for it.  That would keep things simple.

 

[Stige]

Wait, did I just find a reason to have more than 8GB of RAM in your system? How does this thing work? It somehow puts your game into RAM without a ramdisk or what exactly?
What is this cache people speak of? Windows cache? How does it work?

 

[Crazy9000]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Stige

Wait, did I just find a reason to have more than 8GB of RAM in your system? How does this thing work? It somehow puts your game into RAM without a ramdisk or what exactly?
What is this cache people speak of? Windows cache? How does it work?

Ever since windows Vista, windows has a caching feature that stores stuff you've accessed recently in to RAM, so when you launch the program again, it loads it from the RAM instead of the HDD/SSD. It sounds like this program is allowing you to load your whole game folder into that cache, so when you launch the game, it's loading everything from the RAM cache, instead of from disk.

The game will still be loading the data from the RAM cache to the spot in RAM it loads it's data in to... but it will be a RAM -> RAM transfer, which will obviously be faster than SSD, and tons faster than HDD. The only way to be better would be if the game itself paged everything it could possibly want in to RAM on startup... but the game itself would have to be coded to do that. None I know of do... haven't seen anything with "minimum system requirements: 20GB RAM"

.

I've actually been using a RAM disk to load games in to, but this is a much more elegant solution. I'll have to try it out.