Dynamic workspaces cache

Unity Services
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1

We’ve been starting to use the Dynamic Workspaces, and I have some questions.

Back in the release announcement, it said:

  • They use a Least Recently Used (LRU) cache system, meaning the actual space used by workspaces can be controlled, and files not recently accessed will be removed from the local cache, freeing up space.
  • The same cache is used by multiple workspaces that point to the same repo, so you can have as many copies as you need, but the actual space will be just a single copy.

There’s some interesting stuff here for multiple copies of the same workspace. But I wonder, what is the max cache size and is there any way to change that? It would be bad to have two copies of a workspace if added together with other dynamic workspaces blew past the cache size. You’d constantly be having to redownload files.

Second, is there any way to move the cache off the C: drive (where LOCALAPPDATA is located)? We have a lot of users that are using dynamic workspaces because their C: drive is tight on space.

2

Hi,

what is the max cache size and is there any way to change that?

You can specify the max amount of disk that you want to use for the cache using the parameter “–cachemaxsizeingb” As a sample : plasticfs.exe --cachemaxsizeingb 100 . By default, it depends on the size of the disk where it’s located:

  • Disk size <200GB → Cache size 10% of the disk size
  • Disk size <500GB → Cache size 25GB
  • Disk size >=500GB ->Cache size 50GB for cache

is there any way to move the cache off the C: drive (where LOCALAPPDATA is located)?

Please see the command below on how to set cache path:
plasticfs --cachepath d:\_cache\_plastic

Please let us know if you have any questions.

3

Thanks for the answers!

There’s no way of setting this in the GUI (or with a config file, especially through plastic-global-config), though, so what you’d need to do is tell users to go and change the startup shortcut item added, correct? And it wouldn’t take effect if they stop/started dynamic workspaces from the GUI (for example, when they updated Plastic, so they weren’t getting plasticfs started from the startup item).

4

I played with changing it a bit, and I did find that if you start plasticfs from the button in the gui, it always just uses the params “–install”. That’s pretty unfortunate, if a user has needed to use dynamic workspaces due to disk space concerns (I’d think a common use case).

Best scenario would probably be to have it configurable in the GUI. I realized a plastic-global-config probably isn’t workable, because different people will have different drive letters for additional drives (and some will have only C: drives and won’t need it, anyway). So there’s no blanket setting I can give everyone.

Then when you change settings in the GUI, it’d change the settings of the startup shortcut. Or plasticfs would have a conf file, and wouldn’t need usually need command line parameters. And the GUI would just write the changes to that and restart plasticfs.

I also noticed a bit of a bug that I should enter a report on. When you switch plasticfs to use a cache on a different drive, it seems to corrupt the dynamic workspaces you previously created. You can’t open them any more, and you can’t delete them from the GUI. You have to manually remove them from plastic.workspaces.