Question on rolling and manual cache

Yes I bought an airport from aerosoft leib
Kept getting CTD was advised by aerosoft to turn off rolling cache and all good now

Thats interesting… I know there are number of people on here who suggest turning it off entirely. I’m not sure how much it’s used with a decent internet.

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I ran initially with a rolling cache and manual cache set at various sizes. Every time there is an update, you have to clear them anyway, which became a hassle. Then when I realised how much data was being written to my SSD, I decided to run without either and have been doing so with no issues for months. The only difference I have noticed is that loading times sometimes take a little bit longer but nothing massive.

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Yes I have it all turned off but I have a 300 mbps internet connection so I don’t have to use it

Ok so I now have a rolling cache of 16 GB and Manual Cache is set to off. I used the default path for it which is on the C: drive.
Just did two of the same flights I have been doing all week, with no issue this time.
So maybe this will work now.

Can someone explain to me in layman’s terms, what rolling cache is and why you would want it, and what Manual Cache is ?

Thanks for any feedback, just trying to wrap my head around these two things in the data options.

As I understand it…

Rolling cache - will save or buffer data from the servers. instead of pulling it over the wire, it’ll get it from your disk if it exists there. older data that hasn’t been used will be replaced by new data. EDIT: This is just a theory but setting your rolling to some crazy size I think hurts because it’s one huge file to parse. I’m not sure of the file’s internal structure but it’s just one big file, and manipulating a 50GB file is never ideal.

Manual - you can select areas you want to manually pull down. again if you have a bad internet but always fly over the same area you can download locally just that area. but i don’t think manual really works all that well yet

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Great thanks much for the good explanation it makes sense and I can even understand it! Going to leave it as is for now and see how it gets along with further time in it. I do have a habit of flying in same areas so maybe this rolling cache will be good for me.

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Why avoid it? If you have the space on a reasonably fast drive it can be a godsend especially for low and slow with noticably less popping and culling.

Cache is not only about disk performance. It keeps data, instead of downloading the latest (new) data.

Doesn’t surprise me… You get CTD… or bad scenery… or upscaled nonsense buildings… Switch cache off… when your internet is ok, you’ll make sure you don’t run into incompatible data still in your cache.

Things change at this moment. Servers are being updated, WU-6 improved ground textures. You don’t want to miss that… or partially miss that… or run into CTD’s, because things in your disk cache don’t match server data.

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Yeah my C drive is on an M2 Nvme so should be good there.
I will just make sure I clear and delete it after each update and rebuild it.
Will at least give it a try for a bit and see how I get along with it.

That’s just my experience, that being said it was many updates ago when half the time the GUI would crash creating it. I was gung ho at first as I was all 1TB M2 drives and thought this had to be better! And in theory it should be, but I don’t know about the coding side. Again, this was a few major updates ago and things may have improved. But I have learned a keep it simple with MSFS, it’s so unstable I try not to push features or add too many mods.

That statement makes no sense: the rolling cache has nothing to do with screen resolution. It caches downloaded mesh/texture data, and as such: the bigger the better.

That being said, cached data can become „stale“ when it is replaced by newer data server-side. Now in theory this should be detected by the client (FS 2020), e.g. with the help of „time to live“ (TTL) timestamps, hash values of the cached data (expensive to compute) or simply by the version number etc.

In practise it may be better to manually clear the cache, especially after major WU / SU. So what @ArcanePython931 said.

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I haven‘t had a look at the created cache file(s) on disk myself, but one would hope that the cache is indexed and organised „in chunks“ (smaller files), so the cache size shouldn‘t impact performance too much (just like a proper database can handle petabytes of data - of course I don‘t expect a proper database technology underneath here…).

But even if the cache would be just „one single BLOB“ operating systems offer ways to (at least) efficiently read the data (keyword: memory-mapped access). But yes, manipulating (write, delete) the cache would become more expensive.

In my experience data seems to load in blocks of about that size and with NVme or a ram drive it has time enough to reload inbetween flushes. More to the point it that is fast enough to stop any culling regardless of where the precache slider is set and although I can’t say I’ve seen it I would assume that any object popping will likely happen earlier meaning further from the aircraft’s immediate vicinity.

I mentioned screen resolution purely on assumption that 4K requires more data but until now I have no way to test this (but that could change very quickly as my 3060 arrives today)

Couple of questions…

Which drive have you placed the cache’s on?
(Same drive as OS?)
What is the capacity of that drive?
How much free space remains with/without the caches?

In the case of a rolling cache on an OS drive it must be noted that by default this will also be the drive which any swap file will be on. Depending on how much RAM you have this might lead to a lot of read/write activity to that drive as the swap file will be in use at the same time that FS2020 will be accessing the rolling cache.

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1: c: ( what it defaulted to) M.2 Nvme drive.
2: 1 TB
3: with 16 GB rolling cache have app 627 GB free.

I supposed I will clear and delete it again prior to getting today’s hotfix update, then recreate again. Had no issues at all with it yesterday set like this. Not sure if necessary for a hotfix but maybe best to play it safe.
I would note I have 32 GB of system ram and 24 GB of Vram on my GPU.

My rolling cache is 460GB and I have no problems at all, and the sim runs smooth as snot.

Before I got the sim, I was advised “the bigger the better”, I had a 500GB HD lying around gathering dust, so I thought “why not?”

Never regretted it, apart from update time, when I rebuild it :grin:

Turn them off.

If you have 32GB of RAM you aren’t even using the swap file.

I’ve never exceeded 16 GB of RAM use and it’s much faster than any nvme drive.

The caches have always been terrible. Ignore them.

Also, set local scenery caching under graphics settings, or whatever the new feature is called, to Ultra.

Rather than turning off rolling cache completely it is better to put a small 4GB one in a temporary file on ramdisk as it reduces popping and culling, a slight pain having to reallocate if you have powered down your PC between flights but worth it. A manual cache is good for local flying especially if your internet is not the best or when MS are having server problems.

As for the system swap file do not turn it off, just let Windows manage it.

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