user257: Bitcoin is very disk-intensive and that slows it down. It seems to flush data to disk often thus preventing proper caching. With the datadir on a RAMdisk it is much faster.
Is it possible to increase the db cache size or do something else to improve cache performance.
Of course it would be nice to keep the wallet and important data saved but I would not mind the blockchain to be heavily cached.
I'm asking mainly about Windows OS.

user610: Bitcoin (through BerkleyDB) frequently flushes writes to disc to main transaction integrity in wallet.dat and the blockchain databases. The operating system can cache the entire blockchain normally,
I have restarted Bitcoin several times and had it start instantly because the entire blockchain is already cached by the OS.

user208: The very recently released bitcoin v0.6.0 has modified bdb cache settings (25 megabytes by default), and provides a way to change this via the command-line option -dbcache=N, with N a number in megabytes.
This change caused a very significant speedup for synchronizing the block chain indeed.

257: <p>Bitcoin is very disk-intensive and that slows it down. It seems to flush data to disk often thus preventing proper caching. With the datadir on a RAMdisk it is much faster.</p>
<p>Is it possible to <a href="http://doc.gnu-darwin.org/am_conf/cachesize.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">increase the db cache size</a> or do something else to improve cache performance.</p>
<p>Of course it would be nice to keep the wallet and important data saved but I would not mind the blockchain to be heavily cached.</p>
<p>I'm asking mainly about Windows OS.</p>
 610: <p>Bitcoin (through BerkleyDB) frequently flushes writes to disc to main transaction integrity in wallet.dat and the blockchain databases. The operating system can cache the entire blockchain normally,</p>

<p>I have restarted Bitcoin several times and had it start instantly because the entire blockchain is already cached by the OS.</p>
 208: <p>The very recently released bitcoin v0.6.0 has modified bdb cache settings (25 megabytes by default), and provides a way to change this via the command-line option -dbcache=N, with N a number in megabytes.</p>

<p>This change caused a very significant speedup for synchronizing the block chain indeed.</p>
