Windows - How to drop the HDD cache

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa363858(VS.85).aspx

Thanks, I can see some caching info in that link, but this relates to CreateFile and not FindFirstFile, there is no option to specify these flags in FindFirstFile ?

Please let me know what you had in mind.

thanks again

Is there a particular reason why you want this to be slower?

Yes, the software will normally run one time on the end clients, sometimes as part of bootup, but usually from a sysadmin's scheduled task. So I have to optimise it for uncached behaviour. To do the optimisation, I need to be able to reproduce the same conditions as just after a reboot. But a reboot of a box takes quite some time, so I'm hoping for a solution like a dos command which clears any cache, or a way of calling findfirstfile that stops it caching in the first place.

Just to clarify this is purely for my debug environment so I can replicate the slowness of running the software against a booted up machine.

thanks

OK, this is just an idea, though it could work: Create a network share for your partition and access it via '\\machine\sharename' - this might circumvent the cache.

Thanks, but in this case it would take quite a bit of development effort to do that.

I guess no might be a valid answer here, but lets just see what other ideas come in.. thanks

The program isn't just a root scan of all folders, it scans for specific folders via the registry, shortcuts, key areas, etcm and then deep scans those to specific levels depending on context. So there's not a single root. I'll see if I can fudge a way around it, but I suspect I need some "cache killer" program that fools the OS and disks into losing any cache !  

I never found a solution, so ended up spending days rebooting it instead. THe shares stuff still got cached

thanks for helping anyway. I guess it just might not be possible to remove cached information.