On Thu, 17 Jan 2019 12:15:13 -0500, Wolf K
wrote:

On 2019-01-17 11:05, nospam wrote:
In article , Wolf K
wrote:

By default MS Word is set to NOT clear cache on closing and to store
cache for 14 days!

There is also an option to clear cache .

I cleared cache, set the program to only hold for one day and to clear
when closed.

I also told my wife she can run the tool kit to clear cache anytime she
wanted...and to do so periodically after large edits.

She had no further problems yesterday* but I did not make this discovery
until close to the end of her work day.

Thanks for this. Fits what I think I know. IIRC, the cache by default is
written to disk at regular intervals, so a large cache would invoke
paging. Paging takes a long time.

no. writing to disk can be done in the background and does not
necessarily involve paging, which itself does not take a long time.


You haven't experienced an under-resourced machine, then. Our first
laptop had 1GB RAM. There was constant disk activity as paging was done
"in the background." Anything that involved the disk (eg Saving a doc)
was painfully slow. I maxed the RAM to 2GB, the difference was spectacular.

I assume that you're referring to a machine running Vista or higher.
1GB was great before that.

The issue involves how much idle time is available for background tasks.
Sure, modern machines are very fast compared to older ones, but we have
also come to expect much faster responses. OP indicated that the machine
was responding too slowly. His reported solution suggests that caching
and paging were somehow involved. A 14 day old cache could be several
GB, so even 16GB of RAM might not have enough space to hold it without
paging. Paging involves writing and reading back. Hence it's slower than
simple writing to disk.

In short, resetting the cache retention changed the amount of data to be
held in RAM, hence reduced the need for paging, hence speeded up the
machine's repsonse. The details would be of interest to someone who
wants to make the process faster, but unfortunately they aren't available.

Cache should automatically be emptied the moment _any_ program is
closed. I can't imagine what the benefit of leaving it there actually
is.