index.dat & IE Slowdown

[Kris Hyde]

Hi,

I'm using a fully patched version of Win 2000, but have have recently
been suffering from spuradic IE slowdown, during which IE uses up 100%
of CPU resources. Using filemon.exe I found that during this time tens
of thousands of attempted accesses were being made to the index.dat
files for each page loaded. Close inspection showed that two of the
index.dat files were 0k long (located in the ...local
settings\temporary index files\content.ie5 and, rather curiously, in
the ...local settings\temp\temporary index files\content.ie5 folders).
Thus, I'm guessing that they have got somehow corrupted and IE is
slowing down because of the effort of trying to repeatedly read them.

Using sofware available (IDSuite.exe - can recommend), I deleted all
index.dat files on my system. When logging back in, it should recreate
the index.dat files it needs with a starting size of 32k - yet sure
enough they were back again at 0k.

I'm guesing that to recreate the files to 32k each time there must be
a template or something somewhere on the system, which I'm guesing is
the part that is corrupted. Can anyone know where this is located, or
offer any other suggestions about what is going on??

Cheers,

Kris Hyde

 

[Smoker]

Hi,

I'm using a fully patched version of Win 2000, but have have recently
been suffering from spuradic IE slowdown, during which IE uses up 100%
of CPU resources. Using filemon.exe I found that during this time tens
of thousands of attempted accesses were being made to the index.dat
files for each page loaded. Close inspection showed that two of the
index.dat files were 0k long (located in the ...local
settings\temporary index files\content.ie5 and, rather curiously, in
the ...local settings\temp\temporary index files\content.ie5 folders).
Thus, I'm guessing that they have got somehow corrupted and IE is
slowing down because of the effort of trying to repeatedly read them.

Using sofware available (IDSuite.exe - can recommend), I deleted all
index.dat files on my system. When logging back in, it should recreate
the index.dat files it needs with a starting size of 32k - yet sure
enough they were back again at 0k.

I'm guesing that to recreate the files to 32k each time there must be
a template or something somewhere on the system, which I'm guesing is
the part that is corrupted. Can anyone know where this is located, or
offer any other suggestions about what is going on??

CacheSentry is a free app that takes over management of caches where IE
always screws up., and does a few minor fixes, one of them is Cache Index
Size Bugfix. Read about it because I was using it wrong... you have to set
the cache size in IE to the max for CacheSentry to work or IE adds as much
space as it wants (which it seems to do anyhow).
http://www.enigmaticsoftware.com/

 

[Kris Hyde]

Thanks for that. I tried installing CacheSentry; however, on running,
it simply tells me that it can't run because the cache is corrupted.

Something is still corrupting the index.dat file, which is still
returning its size as 0k.

Cheers,

Kris Hyde

 

[Kris Hyde]

I appologise for my last mail - it seems I was being too hasty! The
CacheSentry, doesn't fix my corrupted cache, but once I've managed to
reset the fault, if I leave it running in the background it does
appear to stop the cache becomeing corrupted. The only problem I had
with it was that the feature I needed to be running constantly, is off
by defualt, and seems to be randomly enabled, depending on who is
logged in. To get arround this, I've written a bit of code which I run
as a login script, which sets the following key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\software\engimaticsoftware\cachesentry\options = 11,

then runs the cachesentry prog. That seems to do the trick.

Thanks for your help,

Kris Hyde