[sldev] Cache speed experiment & results...

[Buckaroo Mu]

I just doubled the memory in my PC from 1.5g to 3g. Since I knew that SL 
would perform perfectly fine with 2g (having performed well with 1.5g), 
I loaded up a RAMDisk driver and created a 1G RAMDisk. Testing with 
various software indicated that the drive was performing phenomenally 
fast, as expected. I loaded up SL, and set my Cache Folder to a new 
folder on that empty 1G RAMDisk, and fired things up. SL immediately 
created the various cache files & structures on the RAMDisk, so I know 
things were running as intended.

The result? Even after loading everything in the sim into the cache, 
tping between two locations (in the same sim, but outside of draw 
distance from each other) resulted in ZERO perceptible texture loading 
speedup. Loading from the RAMDisk was as slow as loading from regular 
disk. I presume, therefor, that the real bottleneck in the cache isn't 
reading from the drive. This is horribly dismaying. What progress is 
there toward an improved caching mechanism? Is there a way to store the 
textures in a decoded, ready-to-use fashion? Why is the cache so slow?

-Buckaroo Mu

ps - P4 3ghz, 3gb PC3200 memory, 8600GTS, 320g SATA-2 disk.