Configure the disk cache to improve disk performance

1 January 2000 by Snakefoot | Comment » | Trackback Off
To avoid accessing the HDD every time to read a file, it caches the most used files or at least the most used parts of the file. The RAM allocated for disk cache cannot be used by applications, so if having a limited amount of RAM one should consider the amount of memory used for disk caching.

Edit the file C:\Windows\System.ini and find the section [vcache] and write the following:

[vcache]
MaxFileCache = 8192
MinFileCache = 1024
ChunkSize = 512

The above values means that it will take 8192 KByte of your memory to use for the virtual disk cache. The memory will be allocated in chunks of 512 KByte.

One can use the following table to find a suitable value:
Installed RAM MaxFileCache MinFileCache ChunkSize
32 Mbyte 2048 1024 512
64 Mbyte 4096 1024 512
128 Mbyte 8192 1024 512
256+ Mbyte 32768 4096 1024
More Info MS KB Q108079
More Info MS KB Q225497

Updated: 24 September 2007

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