QVCS Archive Caching

Beneath the Project menu, there is a Rebuild Cache menu selection. If you select the menu item, it will rebuild the cache for the selected directory.

Beginning with the QVCS 3.8 release, caching is always enabled. When caching is enabled, QVCS checks an archive directory for the existence of an archive cache file (named Q$QCache). If the cache file exists, then QVCS reads the cache file to obtain all the information about the archive files located in that directory. If the cache file doesn't exist, QVCS reads each archive file separately, and from them obtains the information that is otherwise contained in the cache. It then creates the cache file, so that in the future when it reads the archive information from that directory, it will be able to read from the cache instead of having to read each file separately.

With the cache enabled, every time someone makes a change to an archive, the cache for that directory is also updated so that the cache always is up to date with the latest information for the archives in that directory.

The QVCS command line utilities are "cache aware." However, they don't update the cache - whenever they make a change to an archive file, they delete the associated cache file so that QWin will have to re-create it. This guarantees that if the cache exists, it will be accurate.