Mesa 17.1 Will Use A 1GB Shader Cache Limit

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Mesa 17.1 Will Use A 1GB Shader Cache Limit

While Timothy Arceri at Valve had just made the change to a 5% cache size limit of your disk space from an original 10% maximum threshold, he's now changed it to just a 1GB cache limit...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Mesa-Patch-1GB-Cache-Limit

[starshipeleven]

Good to see that they used a saner limit.

If 1GB is the "conservative" size limit then using a 5% would have made 0 sense for like... everyone.
If 1GB is 5% of my drive, then my drive is 20 GB. It's hard to even find SSDs that small.

[TumultuousUnicorn]

I really hope we can change this limit (with an environment variable).
I think using percent is a nonsense, but 1GB is not enough. Please allow user to choose of many GB to use.

The Shader Cache is a very exciting new feature, I'm waiting for Mesa 17.1!

[Michael]

I really hope we can change this limit (with an environment variable).
I think using percent is a nonsense, but 1GB is not enough. Please allow user to choose of many GB to use.

The Shader Cache is a very exciting new feature, I'm waiting for Mesa 17.1!

There already is via
MESA_GLSL_CACHE_MAX_SIZE

[SpyroRyder]

I really hope we can change this limit (with an environment variable).
I think using percent is a nonsense, but 1GB is not enough. Please allow user to choose of many GB to use.

The Shader Cache is a very exciting new feature, I'm waiting for Mesa 17.1!

While I am not saying you are wrong, how do you know 1GB isn't enough?

[ssam]

How mush space does the cache typically use? Do you need to be running many large games on many mesa releases to hit 1GB?

Can cache eviction take shader compile time into account? Some shaders might be big but take a small time to recompute.

[mitch074]

The 1GB limit could be attained fast - except if compression is activated. I don't remember if compiled shaders are currently compressed, what's the status? If it is, how much does a game like DE:MD (which is VERY heavy on shaders) take up?

[cl333r]

We realized our opinions are shallow for we don't know how much shader cache fits into 1GB.
A few examples of real-world app and game shader cache usage would help.

[Adarion]

I'll trust the developers, I guess they already do have some experience. And if they think it's better to keep it relatively(!) small (1 GB is more capacity than my first computer had HDD space) and wait until they have algorithms to determine stale and old cached objects and to remove them, well, it'll be fine. Besides, it's already adjustable if there is need.
Most important is that this feature will hit "the shelves" for users to grab because it could really improve esp. loading times on some games.

[starshipeleven]

For all you people that use a bleeding edge distro with this feature enabled, the cache is in ~/.cache/mesa
Could you post your sizes and what games you have?