Looking at my WinXP "task manager" display, I see that "System Cache" is currently 465MB. Now the OS uses that to hold many different things, but also recently read disk data. The question becomes not how many files, but how much space they total together.
If I wanted to read the same 200MB of file data again and again, I (likely) would not see the disk light flash because all the data would fit and still be present in the cache memory. If I needed to repeatedly process 500MB of file data, I likely would find other things to do while the disk light flashed for many minutes, _each_ time, because all the data could not fit in cache and _must_ be re-read each time.
-
Are you posting in the right place? Check out Where do I post X? to know for sure.
-
Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags. Currently these include the following:
<code> <a> <b> <big>
<blockquote> <br /> <dd>
<dl> <dt> <em> <font>
<h1> <h2> <h3> <h4>
<h5> <h6> <hr /> <i>
<li> <nbsp> <ol> <p>
<small> <strike> <strong>
<sub> <sup> <table>
<td> <th> <tr> <tt>
<u> <ul>
-
Snippets of code should be wrapped in
<code> tags not
<pre> tags. In fact, <pre>
tags should generally be avoided. If they must
be used, extreme care should be
taken to ensure that their contents do not
have long lines (<70 chars), in order to prevent
horizontal scrolling (and possible janitor
intervention).
-
Want more info? How to link
or How to display code and escape characters
are good places to start.
|