Hi there,
What is the purpose of using the Rolling Cache? Any help is appreciated. TIA.
if you fly in the same area often, the scenery gets stored in the cache space you’ve set, so it doesn’t have to stream (download) it to you on the fly.
If you don’t often fly in the same area, it’s basically pointless, and will just take disc space which continuously gets overwritten with new data.
4 Likes
On the average what should I set the Rolling Cache to?
On the average, the default 8 GB.
You don’t specify your flying, same or different areas.
Although, I think 8 Gb is good for both.
1 Like
I usually fly from KVRB (Vero Beach, FLorida) to KDFW (Dallas, Texas) and sometimes from KPBI (WPB,Florida) To KDFW…
Doesn’t matter.
Follow what @MortThe2nd stated and make your decision.
If you don’t understand what Rolling Cache does, it speeds up your
FS2020 since it doesn’t have to download scenery from the internet
and can load scenery from your disk.
Disk access is faster than download.
If you have the spare disk space, set Rolling Cache to any size you
want in GB.
I set mine to 32 GB but didn’t see any diffeerence and set it back to 8 GB.
1 Like
If you fly only specific routes then it may actually be better to simply use manual cache and turn the rolling cache off.
This would be the most efficient use of your drive.
Rolling cache will store areas you fly through but once it hits whatever limit you have defined it will start to overwrite. It’s a continuous process so even if you are flying the same location all the time then it’s still updating that cache.
Manual cache is just there. Once you cache an area it will not continuously overwrite.
It’s recommended to clear/delete the cache when FS2020 updates. This makes sense as there may be scenery updates included which may clash with whatever you have cached. I’ve seen this. Had an issue after an update which deleting my rolling and manual caches resolved.
If bing map is updated, by using rolling cache, is this cache notifying and updated or do you still use old stuff ?
It will continue to use what is stored in cache until it’s overwritten or you delete the cache.
This is why purging the cache is recommended when the game updates. Not doing so has been reported as the cause of all sort of issues.
The put it simply, it does absolutely nothing. In my own testing it does nothing to reduce bandwidth usage of the simulator itself, it does nothing to remove any stuttering or glitching in the game and, if anything, it actually causes glitching and stuttering. Manual caching is the same, it does nothing, even if you can get it to work with the awful user interface they designed to go with it.
3 Likes
So bing map is update only during official updates ? (not any small adjustment between ?)
personnaly since i don’t use any update, i didn’t see any difference in performance. Perhaps for people with limited amount of data per month, it can be usefull.
You’re jumping to conclusions based on your own experience. What’s your specs.. cache not only helps to reduce communications, it also provides MSFS with preloaded scenery it would else have to read from thousands of separate files. I don’t need rolling cache, because I have good internet, an SSD and i7, my low performance GPU delimits the performance. Someone with a 2060, a disk drive and i5 may profit from rolling cache. Others with slow or unreliable internet connections could profit as well.
1 Like
If you have an SSD drive and recommended internet speed do not bother, rolling cache will only cause you problems.
3 Likes
It’s really simple and it has nothing to do with specs. The idea of caching is storing data locally so it does not have to be retrieved subsequently. Turned on or off the game exhibits no change in performance. Anything that stutters with it off still stutters with it on and data usage is unchanged. Ergo; it does nothing. The system I use is as powerful as you can get. This is not a complex mechanism and it should come as no surprise that it doesn’t work since there are any number of features in the game that do not work.
If you have an SSD drive and recommended internet speed do not bother, rolling cache will only cause you problems.
Precisely, it does nothing at all.
1 Like
Rolling cache makes no sense if you are flying to new locations all the time. The system would need to write and read the cache 24/7 which doesn’t help the performance. It gets even worse if you are running the game AND rolling cache on the same drive.
1 Like
Yes this is true. Connection to servers in a title where almost all the data is streamed live is pretty critical.
With regards older, less able hardware though, having the cache on could in fact have a negative impact on performance whether that be as simple as your only available drive is a slower HDD rather than an SSD or the rather more complex fact that some may find read/write disk tasks + network activity + usb activity etc may saturate the DMI
(In which case reducing this load by perhaps turning off the cache might be of benefit)
When your system is that powerfull and your internet is ok you don’t notice cache. So you say it does nothing and that is Asobo’s fault because they cannot build simple things. I see your logic 
(and I gladly leave you with the happy assumption all things are simple)
1 Like
I took the same flight with it on and off. The data usage was just over 1GB on both occasions. It does nothing, it does not work, it never did work. If you have caching system that is not caching anything then it does not work. If you have a caching system that offers no tangible benefit to any user in any situation then it does not work.
1 Like
There were complaints about stuttering. Bad write performance to HD can cause stuttering, because it is a high priority process. But when you only need to read, that will not count. Like @Chaezza said when you fly the same place every day, using cache will speed up things. Because it is only read access and in that case, a low performance disk drive should profit from cache as well. Flying forward and writing cache all the time is useless anyway, you may as well switch it off.
Take into account none of us knows the internals. In cache diskspace, scenery could e.g. be stored in a GPU-ready state in cache. Reading separate BGL and DDS files requires conversion. So in that case, low performance CPU’s will profit as well from cache, because there is less conversion to be done. But in fact we don’t know how Asobo exactly implemented their rolling cache. When it would be just a stack of downloaded files, cache will help only when your connection is slow.
It’s not only read.
With rolling cache on it continues to stream live and write also.
Throw USB peripherals, USB audio, network access and constant disk access in an older (DMI 2.0) system where the drive is not on a PCIe bus and you suddenly have a huge amount of traffic getting bottlenecked at the DMI.