Diabling dynamic caching....

[Anthony J. Cogan]

I am trying to burn a CD under NT v4.0 and it gets about half the way
through it, before I get a buffer-under-run error. I pull up the resource
monitor and watch my cache, the cache slowly but steadily grows up to 55MB
or so 'till I run out of REAL memory (I have 64MB), and then it starts to
swap. When it swaps temporarily this is where I get the buffer-under-run
error, and let's just say 'another CD bites the dust!'. Is there anyway I
can turn of the dynamic cachine? If I could just tell it not to go over
20MB or so, I should be fine. I'm running on a Pentium 133 with 64MB of
RAM, 2.0GB Fast SCSI-2 hard drive, with a Adaptec 2940 SCSI-2, more than
enough power for this, but when the swapping comes into affect, all goes
down the tubes, I have carving out a 800MB FAT partition, just to run Win
3.1 to burn CD's! BTW: the CDR is a Pinnacle Micro RCD-202.

Anthony Cogan
tco...@one-stop.com

[James C. Owens]

Which version of NT are you running? If you are running Server as a workstation,
you need to change the following registry setting to adjust the way dynamic
caching is implemented: (use regedt32)

\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory
Management\LargeSystemCache = 1 should be set to 0.

Shut down NTS and restart. I would even check this setting in NTWS, even though
it is supposed to be set to zero on workstation by default.

Some explanation: What this does if set "true" (i.e. 1) is tilt memory
allocation priority towards the dynamic file system cache and away from process
memory. This usually works well on Servers with large amounts of memory where
file I/O is just as, or more, important than running applications. In systems
where applications need lots of memory, memory is (relatively) limited, and file
I/O is causing excessive demand based paging to virtual memory due to cache
growth, this setting should be returned to zero. This will place memory
allocation to the dynamic cache lower than allocation to processes, and prevent
the thrashing you are seeing.

R/

James C. Owens
j...@norfolk.infi.net, jco...@exis.net,
running Windows NT 4.0 Server (Build 1381).
Pentium 133, 64 MB RAM, 2x2 GB 8 ms F-W SCSI-2 HD's.