cellardweller said:
I recently found a pdf from Tascam titled Optimizing Windows 2k and windows xp for audio.
This document recommends disabling write behind caching. (which I thought I had already done, on the recommendation of a separate tweak document).
With the caveat that I am not a Windows person....
That would be full of shit, IMHO. The only reason not to cache is if you are afraid your computer will crash and are trying to avoid loss of data written just before the crash. If your system regularly crashes while you are recording, you have bigger problems than caching and should fix your hardware problems instead of hackishly working around them.
Disabling write-back caching (that's the correct name for it; write-behind is a nonstandard term...) will significantly diminish overall disk performance. The purpose of write-back caching in an operating system is to prevent transient files (temporary files that are deleted a few seconds after they are created) from ever reaching the disk. The caching reduces problems with these temporary creations and deletions interfering with audio recording and playback performance (legitimate reads and writes). With a filesystem like FAT (which is fundamentally dog slow to begin with), this is an extremely important thing to have turned on....
There may have been good reason to disable this in old versions of Windows (95 and/or 98), but most modern OSes do this by default and don't have any problems with it. You can't disable it in Linux, Mac OS X, any of the BSDs, any UNIX system, etc. I'm really, really surprised that Windows even offers a way to disable it.... Don't disable it unless you are having problems, and if disabling it doesn't fix the problem, reenable it.
I'd be utterly shocked if disabling write-back caching ever fixed any real performance problems. The only case where it could reasonably improve things would be where the application is so marginal that it doesn't do any read-ahead of audio data -and- the OS fails to do any read-ahead, either....
cellardweller said:
Also, it recommends disabling disk performance monitoring by typing "diskperf-n" (without quotation marks). I typed it in as specified...and nothing. I removed the hyphen, and a DOSS window popped up at lightspeed. I was unable to tell what exactly happened.
There's a space. It's "diskperf -n". And they're wrong about that, too. This is disabled by default.
