Using a RamDisk with Notes Client

From time to time I have some issues with my Notes Client. In almost every case these issues occur when the CACHE.NDK size is at 30MB.

Bringing the Notes Client down, deleting cache.ndk and let the client create a new file at startup solves the issues.

There is already an entry on IdeaJam to delete the cache.ndk on client startup. (http://ideajam.net/ideajam/p/ij.nsf/0/D599DAE62FA43BBB86257723005994BC). As there is no such option in the client by now, I tried to find a way other than deleting the file manually.

Putting a cmd file into the Windows Startup folder is one option. But I wanted to go one step further. Accessing the cache.ndk does also mean I/O operations on the physical harddrive. OK, I could use SSD, but I do not have an SSD drive in my current environment.

So I decided to give a RAMDISK a try. I found a good one at http://www.ltr-data.se/opencode.html/#ImDisk.

he installer installs he driver as a service, so it can be started at Windows startup. In addition to get the RAMDISK to work you have to create a disk and format it every time Windows starts.

I created a ramdisk.cmd file in my Windows directory and created a shortcut to this file in the Startup folder for all users.

Here is the content:

imdisk -a -t vm -s 300m -m n:
format n: /V:RAMDISK /FS:FAT /Q /Y

The first line creates the disk in RAM ( n:\)  and the second line formats the disk.

In addition, I changed my notes.ini file and added

CACHE=n:\cache.ndk

The next time you start your client, CACHE.NDK is created in the RAMDISK. When you shutdown your computer, the RAMDISK is removed and so a new file is created on every client start.

I will now play with some other notes.ini variables that normally perform disk operations to see, what the side effects are.