Author: William H Rogers
Date: 07:30:22 10/23/98
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Robert The way I understood it was like this: suppose that you are accessing a long list of names and addresses off your hard drive. When the computer fetches the first address it also continues to load as many more as it can hold in the cache memory, so that if you secquence through the files, the next one is already in memory waiting for you. This speeds up the access. Before the invent of cache, some programmers would create a large file in memory and load it with data from their files, because memory access is much faster than disk access. I wrote a small spell checker once and loaded the dictionary totally into memory. It ran fast that way. However if I updated the dictionary, I had to write it back to the hard disk when the program was through As far as where the cache is located, on some of the newer machines, part of it is in the cpu and another part in held in chips on the mother board. It usually works much faster that regular ram. Bill
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