It works very well, in yesterday’s Dev video Seb thought the average cache efficiency was 80% but for me I estimate 95% for recent objects, give or take.
Then I hovered around with FreeCAM at ground level to hoover up fine textures.
16 Airports fills the 128 cache (I think). Recent updates by Asobo may force re-streaming, especially in these early days.
However I won’t be using that number of airports on a regular basis, and I doubt anybody would, over say a week.
I have not used OMDB for a week and that seemed to stream a bit under Task Manager for the sim process.
But CYVR I have used recently and today after picking the airport the disk IO peaked at 17 GB/s for a few seconds, then after Start Flight another burst of high disk IO, plus a burst of streamed data (weather).
The high disk IO was reading from the cache, instead of streaming.
It will be interesting to hear some details from anyone else using a large Rolling Cache.
i had slow internet yesterday and i tried 2024 to see how it went
of course it went horrible
lots of incomplete zombie aircraft missing airframe parts
shouldn’t they have been cached?
I noticed when I spawned into the A320Neo(V2) @ JFK for the first time that it took about 30 seconds to load the entire aircraft and scenery (1Gb internet..)
The next few times I spawned the details loaded much more quickly.
I think that means the RC is working, but I agree it’s still an unknown.
I need to check my Network I/O vs. Disk I/O with a different aircraft at a new airport. I have not been looking at those metrics.
That’s a very good question - some brief feedback on cache status would be great.
In yesterday’s Dev video Seb said in the first week the cache could become fragmented. The sim asks for data, the overloaded content delivery system says no, the sim keeps asking and the loop repeats 20 times and the sim gives up.
That leaves partially loaded objects in the cache, giving missing airframe parts. It should not happen, but is less likely over time.
There are two options: delete the cache and start afresh OR try again by zooming really close to the planes. That will trigger the finer textures to download hopefully. You should see Task Manager showing MSFS with Network activity.
BTW: If you can, don’t kill 2024 as that can corrupt the cache or lose some streamed data. Shut it down correctly via the menu, which will close (and flush) the disk cache correctly.
Are you saying the FS24 rolling cache is empty whenever we start the sim?
IIRC, the FS20 RC data was maintained, storing the previous data for use in recurring flights.
The cache file is Opened() in the sim, like any other file. That locks the file to the sim, no other program can access or delete it.
The sim Reads() and Writes() data from/to the cache.
Finally the cache file is Closed() when the sim Exits to Desktop…as indicated by the Modified/Accessed date/time. Then other programs can access it, like a backup tool.
Closing the cache is critical, so that recently written data is not lost.
Think of it like opening a Word file, typing into it then saving the file. Next time round the latest text is still there, unless you don’t save it properly.
What I want to know is if something is stored in the cache, like an airport or an aircraft, and there has been a recent server-side update of the airport or aircraft, will the sim know to pull the latest version from the server instead of the old data from the cache, or will the old, cached data be used ?
Ive not tried tested with new cache size yet on my series x, but I did just change it to 64gb, If I notice much difference I might increase to 128gb, got the sim installed on 1tb expansion card all to itself, so have plenty of space to play with.
I simply spawned a Cessna at the end of an airport runway, then panned 360 until Task Manager says no network activity. That seems to easily stream 99% of the airport you need.
Using Free Cam to wander very close to items like jetways loads very detailed textures, detailed enough to see the electrical cables for the motors. You may not need to do that, I just did it as a ground works challenge
Only Asobo can answer this but I have to assume they can detect that data is out of date using timestamps / version numbers, and will fetch updated content from the server rather than use outdated content in the cache… otherwise the rolling cache concept would be fundamentally flawed.
All caches have a way to invalidate content, so when a new version of something is created the old versions should be invalidated and the sim will remove that from the cache and update it with the new version.
If this works as I think, and as it should then deleting the rolling cache as we used to do in 2020 is not only no longer neccesary but also a way to decrease performance while the cache gets re-populated.
It is very important to notice this is what I think, I have no way to know if this is how it really works or not.
This is what I would logically assume, but given what Asobo have done to date, I don’t think it’s safe to assume that. It would be good to hear from them directly on this issue.
Yeah that’s how the Google Chrome cache works. Every picture or page has a timestamp - it quizzes the web page and if the dates match it loads the picture quickly from the cache.
If there is a newer date it downloads a new copy of the picture, which takes longer. Client caches have been around for a decade or more.
Asobo have their own version of timestamping that Seb briefly mentioned yesterday, meaning updates can happen silently and automatically.
Nerd alert!
[A lot of systems use version control. So assets can have versions and the sim might load all assets with the same version. For example, a new plane version made of hundreds of components, which naturally must have the same version as the plane, if you want the wings to fit ha ha.
The cool thing then is you can add winglets with a version that matches the plane…timestamping alone can make that extremely messy or impossible.]
)