Softick Cache for Palm OS

About Softick Cache

Why Softick Cache? All desktop operating systems has built-in cache for disk operations. This is a very important part of operating system, because non-cached disk input/output operations sensitively slows down an overall performance. That''s why Softick decided to bring this missing essential component to Palm OS world. How does it work? You probably know that all modern Palm devices can access expansion cards, or have built-in flash disks. In most cases, built-in flash disks also used by Palm operating system to store and access programs and databases which were formely stored in dynamic memory. This solution brings more safety and leads to less power consumption, but also it is slower. Many Palm users noticed increased response time of the most applications on the newer models, this effect appeared exactly because of slower storage memory access. At the same time, availability of high-capacity SD cards made them more popular for keeping personal data, applications, games, music and video. It is clear that increased card data transfers made lack of transfer speeds more evident. After number of investigations, Softick team developed an intelligent solution which utilizes faster dynamic memory to remember most frequently used data, accessed by the system and applications. As indicated by our investigations, there are many duplicated and non-aligned requests to the Palm flash memory and expansion cards, so it was definitely reasonable to implement required read and write optimizations. First our tests executed on the preliminary versions proved right approach and effectiveness of such solution. Now you can download Softick Cache by yourself and estimate performance growth by analyzing cache statistics.