Okay so you’ve been in Second Life and wandering around and noticed that now and then your avatar moves like it’s have a bad case of constipation.  Then you notice that, huh, your hard drive light is pounding away.  It’s because the cache in SL is more or less broken.  It’s helpful and needed but it’s not that good.

Also have you noticed that almost all of the time when you crash, the hard drive is pounding away.  I suspect that the client is not getting data fast enough from disk and gives up.  I noticed this a year or so ago and I “fixed” this on my home PC.  How did I fix it?  Ummm…  I used a trick I use all the time at work - brute force. 

Yes Virginia, with sufficient thrust pigs will fly just fine….  I took four (yes four) hard drives and made a RAID 1+0 strip set.  That is mirrored two sets of hard drives together and then stripped them.  It was wicked fast, at least for a PC.  After I did that I noticed that the number of times I would crash decreased, probably because the disk system could keep feeding the client.

Now, I’m on my laptop, which perversely is faster than my old home PC, except in one critical area, the disk is much slower and it shows.  I’ve been banging my head on what to do about it, and tonight I thought, why don’t I move the cache to this external drive I use?  It’s much faster and it will get another spindle going…  That worked pretty good, and then I though, why stop there?  I know what I need!  A RAM DISK!

Cue evil laughter…

I’ve got 4GB of RAM in this beast (although Vista only sees 3GB because it’s 32bit….), I can spare some RAM for this….  You will probably need at least 2GB of RAM on your machine for this trick to work….

1. You will need RAM DISK software.  Free software for 2000, XP and Vista you can find here.
2. You will probably need to reboot after installing it.  I set aside 320MB of RAM.
3. Set your SL Disk Cache to a directory you made in that new RAMDISK (drive R), I used a directory called SL.  Set the cache size lower by a few megs than your disk size.
4. Restart SL.
5. Enjoy.  You will have to reload everything, and initially while your cache is reloading things will be slow.

Downsides….  There are some downsides.  If you do not “save” your RAMDISK, you are going to need to reload your SL cache every time you reboot.  This software has a feature to load and save images.  This is an obvious bummer.  Have a care doing this and how you do it.

Performance is much better.  The system is now bottle necking with RAM (or the RAMDISK software) rather than the disk.  It still could be better, but this pig now has a chance at getting airborne….

-Veyron