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View Full Version : Windows XP, the file cache and copying big files


LordDethstar
7th April 2003, 07:49
Hello,
I've seached everywhere, but I did not find any answer to my problem. Since this is a video forum, I assume that people here may have that same problem.

Whenever I copy a big file >1.5 GB from one partition to another or over a network, windows appears to be allocating insane amounts of memory for the file cache, leaving none for other applications and even swapping their memory out to disk. That leaves the whole system unusable while copying sich a large file and about two minutes thereafter.

Is there a method that would allow me to limit the size of the Windows XP file cache. Something sells me that a file cache of 64-128 MB would be more than enough.

Btw., I have 512MB of RAM and two hard drives.

Can anyone help?

theReal
7th April 2003, 19:43
You could try to change some of the memory management keys in the registry

http://is-it-true.org/nt/registry/rtips144.shtml

I always set "DisablePagingExecutive" to 1, so the OS won't remove system files from RAM to free memory. This seems to work pretty well for me. However I've had a bad experience with setting "LargeSystemCache" to 1 - it turned my system so slow, I could hardly change it back...

I also tried different values for the "IOPageLockLimit" but I couldn't see any differences at all.