• Overview
• The settings page property controls
• Tips for making manager lists
• About the included manager sets

• The first thing that occurs is the list of URLs in the cache is scanned. The classification of the URLs (normal, offline, stray, etc.) is done later.
• The next thing that is done is files in the cache subfolders are scanned and compared against the URLs already scanned. If there are no matching URLs for a particular file, it is marked as a stray file. If a URL doesn't end up with a matching file, the URL is marked as a stray URL. Note that if you do not have strays set to be scanned every time a regular URL scan is done, neither stray files nor URLs will be found on passes where the stray scan is not done.
• All of the scanned entries are sorted by last access time, so the default deletion order will be "least recently used".
• The content in the cache is classified by type and a corresponding manager is assigned to each file/URL. Since it is possible for a file/URL to match multiple content managers, the managers at the top of the manager list get assigned first if a match is found. The list is then traversed manager by manager until a match to that content is found or the end of the list is reached. If no manager matches the content, no manager is assigned and that content will never be deleted. (You generally do not want this to happen; a catch-all manager should always exist even if it is set to not delete content for a long time.) If the content is assigned a manager that deletes it immediately, it will do so if the deletion wait period has passed. (See below) Otherwise, if the manager is set to include this content's size in the cache size calculations it is added to the size of all the content in the cache. This is repeated for every entry (normal, cookie, and stray) in the cache.
• If the content in the cache is larger than the maximum set size, the cache is reduced in size until it is down to that maximum size. The managers at the top of the list delete their content first, followed by the managers lower in the list until the cache is reduced adequately. Since a manager may have a deletion wait time set, not all of the content a particular manager handles may be deleted until that content has aged enough.
• After all of the above has taken place, CacheSentry Pro goes back to waiting or sleeping until the next management cycle occurs.

THE SETTINGS PAGE PROPERTIES

Overall cache size
The first setting you will see on this page is the overall cache size setting. This is where you set how large you wish to have the Internet Explorer cache grow. The value is is megabytes and this setting is global - it applies to all of the content in the cache as a whole and not to individual cache managers. Note that this value is not a hard limit - depending on how you set the managers to wait for files to age a certain amount before they are available for deletion, the cache may grow larger than the value you set here.

Manager list selector
Next you will see a control that lists and lets you select the manager you want to edit. Do a left mouse button click on the down-pointing arrow to see the list. You can scroll through the list with the scrollbar located on the right. When you select a new manager from the list, its properties are updates in the buttons and controls displayed below. Also, the selector lets you type into it so you can change the name of the currently selected manager.

Change Order
When you click this button, a window will pop open that will allow you to change the order in which the managers are run during a cache management cycle. Managers at the top of the list are run first, while managers at the bottom of the list are run last. To change the order, select a manager in this window you wish to move and use the up and down arrows on the left hand side to move it up and down in the list. Press OK when you have finished changing the order of the managers. If you change your mind and want to undo your changes, press Cancel.

Add Manager
Clicking this button creates a new manager in the list. It will be given a generic name so you'll want to rename it to something meaningful to what it manages. In general, there is no limit to the number of managers you can have in a set but remember: The more managers you have, the more work (and time) the CPU will take to manage the cache!

Remove Selected
Removed the currently selected manager from the list. Once you delete it, you cannot get it back so you will have to recreate it if you make a mistake. It is OK to have no managers in the set but of course that is totally pointless! :-)

Load List
Loads a new set of managers from a file on your hard drive. A dialog window will open so you can select the CacheSentry Manager set (.csm) file to load. The current list of managers will be replaced by the list in the new set. Also, this new set will become the set that will load automatically the next time you start CacheSentry Pro.

Save List
Saves the current set of managers to a file. A dialog will open allowing you to select the name of the file to save the list under. This command also makes the newly saved set the default set which will load the next time CacheSentry Pro starts.

MANAGER PROPERTIES
This section is the set of properties/settings that define how the currently selected manager behaves.

Type of Content
Sets the type of content this manager can work on. There are several types:

• Normal:  This is the content you see when you visit a web page by typing in URLs or clicking on links. If you select this type for this manager, this manager will only see normal web content.
• Offline:  This is content that is downloaded on a schedule (or manually with IE's "synchronize" command) that you have set up to be viewed offline. When you create a favorite for a web site, you may have noticed IE gives you the options of making it available offline. Content that you have made available offline is seen by managers with this type set.
• Normal and offline:  A combo of the above; the manager will see both normal content and offline content.
• Stray files:  A manager will only see stray files if it is set to this type. A stray file is a file that exists in the cache but does not have a URL record associated with it. (All of the URLs are stored in a hidden file named index.dat.) Some stray files are not actually stray; they are part of a file that has not finished downloading completely. This can be anything from a web graphic to an executable program.
• Normal and stray files:  A combo of the above; the manager will see both normal content and stray files.
• Normal, offline, and stray files: The catch-all of the cache. The manager will see all three of the above types of content in the cache.
• Stray URLs: The manager will only work on stray URLs. A stray URL is the opposite of a stray file - there is a URL record in the index.dat file, but the actual physical file associated with it is missing.
• Cookies: Select this for a manager that will only manage cookies.

Manager sees files named
Here you can enter a pattern to match files against, and the manager will only work on files that match this pattern. You can enable this filter (and enter the pattern) by checkmarking the box on the left of it. There are some important rules to know about when using pattern matching:

• The pattern matcher is simple in order to keep it speedy. You can specify a wildcard with the usual "*" (asterisk) character, but it can only appear in one location in the pattern. For example http://www.enigmatic* is legal and will match any URL that begins with "http://www.enigmatic". Also, something like http://www*.jpg is also legal and will match all entries that start with "http://www" and end with the ".jpg" in the filename/URL name. However, doing something like *enigmatic* will not work.
• You must remember to use a pattern that makes sense for the type of content you are working with! If you are working with URLs (from normal, offline, or stray URLs) you must remember to include the "http://" in the pattern string if your wildcard is at the end (or you aren't using a wildcard for this pattern), otherwise it will not see the URLs in most cases. (Since most URLs start with "http://".) Simply specifying only the web address (www.someplace.net for example) won't work. The same is true for cookies. All cookies start with "Cookie:", so don't forget to include that in your cookie managers that use pattern matching. Stray files also have a special consideration: They don't match against anything except the filename since they don't have URLs.Also, IE usually appends bracketed numbers to the filename before the extension (for example "picture[1].gif") so you will have to remember this if you plan to do any pattern matching with stray files.
• If you enable the pattern matching but leave an empty string, that is the same as leaving the pattern matcher disabled. In other words, the manager will not be filtered by naming and will see all content that matches its type and the other filters. Also, specifying a single "*" with no text in the pattern also will match to all names. (However, please remember it is more efficient CPU-wise if you simply disable pattern matching if you plan to match with everything.)
• Pattern matching is case-insensitive. This means it doesn't matter whether you specify the pattern in upper or lower case, or some combination, as it will match against both upper and lower case names. For example HTTP://WWW.HI.COM is the same as http://www.hi.com to the program.
• If you really need to match patterns that have multiple names you can always create multiple managers that handle each part of the name.

Files this manager sees...
This setting allows you to limit the manager to only see content that is larger, smaller, or equal to a size (in kilobytes) that you set. In order to enable this filter you must checkmark the box on the left of it.

This manager will not delete its files until...
This prevents a manager from deleting its assigned content until it hasn't been used for a set amount of time. By "unused" that means the last-access time hasn't changed for that specified time period. The main purpose of this setting is to prevent the manager from trying to delete content that might still be in use. (Trying to delete content that is still in use results in an error #32 message in the activity log.) Also, you can use this setting to ensure cached content stays around for a minimum amount of time if you want to make sure certain types of content are always available in the cache. (For example the favorites icons.) You can specify the amount of time a file must go unused for in either days or hours. When you change one value, the other one is automatically calculated. The hours value is always the value that is used - the days value simply calculates the hours value for you.

Size calculation inclusion
This setting determines when and if the content that is assigned to this manager is included in the total cache size calculation. You may ask why you would ever not want to immediately include the size of content in the cache size calculation, and the reason is simple: If you download a large file it will very likely wipe out a large portion of your cached content, even while it is downloading! Also, content that you may want to always exist in the cache can have its inclusion in the cache size calculation disabled so it appears "invisible" and won't affect the deletion of other content from the cache. Conversely, content that you deem as truly "temporary" (content that will get deleted as soon as it is seen) you probably won't want to include in the size calculation as that will protect all of the content that you do want to keep from being deleted before this "temporary' content. There are three ways to control size inclusion:

1. Content is not deleted until it passes its aging value set in the "When to delete..." setting described above. Obviously, if you don't use the "when to delete" setting for this manager, this option will not be available and will be grayed out.
2. Always include content in the size calculation. This is the main setting to use for standard content.
3. Never include content in the size calculation. Pretty much self-explanatory. Stray URLs and cookies always use this setting (and it is not changeable) because cookies are separate from the cache (and thus don't belong in the cache size calculation) and stray URLs don't have any real files so they don't take up any real space. (They take up space in the index.dat file, but because the index.dat file is not included in the cache size calculation, stray URLs effectively don't take up any space from CacheSentry Pro's point of view.)

Delete content ASAP
Normally, you want the cache to fill to the maximum size you set in the maximum cache size setting and do not want content to be removed until that limit is reached. However for some nuisance content you may want to delete such content immediately. For example, the zero-byte stray files generated by Outlook Express are deleted immediately (after they have gone unused for a while because they do nothing other than take up space in the hard drive's directory listing (and slow the filesystem down). Note that like the size calculation, you cannot set this for cookies and stray URLs because again those two types of content aren't included in the cache size calculation and therefore waiting until the cache fills up is meaningless to them. (They are always deleted as soon as any set "aging" has passed.)

TIPS

• Manager order is very important, and there is somewhat of an art to getting the order just right. See the section below for some insight as to why I put the managers in the included sets in the order they are in. If you can't figure out why your particular manager is seeing/deleting content before another manager even though it is lower in the list, post your manager set to the message forum and there are users and support people than should be able to help you.
• When thinking about manager order, remember that you may want to put a particular type of content high on the list of managers because you either want to 1) delete it before anything else, OR 2) save it from deletion! Once content gets assigned to a manager, it doesn't get re-assigned to a lower listed manager when it also matches that manager's settings.
• Experiment! Because CacheSentry Pro has the "simulate" button, you can try out different cache manager settings without worrying about accidentally deleting all the files in your cache. Plus you can also back up the cache if you are still nervous about a new manager you have created.
• Try not to go crazy with the pattern matching feature by creating many, many, pattern matched managers since the pattern matcher requires the most CPU work out of all the manager filters.
• Don't forget to disable the Auto-manage button when testing managers! Even though the program automatically turns off the auto-manager while you are in the Size Settings page, if you go to the Activity Page to see the results of a simulation it will turn on again and you could lose a lot of content if there is a mistake in how you have set your managers. (When the automanager is re-enabled, it waits 5 seconds before doing a cache management cycle.)
• Again, make sure all content is handled eventually by something. If you allow a group of content to go unmanaged, it will go unnoticed and keep growing in size in the cache until the cache reaches the Internet Explorer cache max size setting. And once that happens, any content can be deleted from the cache!
• Use the activity log to see how old the last listed piece of content being deleted is during a management cycle. This is a great way to tune your overall cache size to a size that keeps the content around for a predetermined amount of time. This way, you don't have to go through all of your managers and individually set the "no deletion" aging time. Use the "no deletion" age setting for keeping files in use from being deleted, or when you want to strictly force content to stay in the cache for a period of time.

ABOUT THE INCLUDED MANAGER SETS

The factory default set

• Zero-byte strays: This manager runs first because zero-byte strays are the most useless of all the content types. :-) Actually, because these files are deleted immediately (after a 2-day wait to make sure they aren't in use - this is done in case the zero-byte file is actually a 500MB file someone is downloading over a slow connection. :-) ) and not when the cache is full it really doesn't matter where this manager appears in the list! If there are any files assigned to this manager they get deleted immediately in the cache sizing part of the cycle.
• Large files: Next to get deleted before anything else are large files that might eat up a large portion of the cache very quickly. Usually these will be downloaded programs but if you view a lot of large videos and music files on the web you may want to remove this manager or fine tune it. It uses the powerful "don't include in overall size until deletion wait time passes" feature. This means it won't affect other cached content because as soon as it ages enough it gets deleted before any other content since this is the second manager in the list. Once it ages, its size gets included and if the size goes over the max (since it has the "cache must be full" option set) bye-bye large file! Note that we include all types of content in the large file category: Normal, offline and stray.
• Favorites icons: This is high in the list because we want to save this content from deletion! If we put it lower in the list below the more generic managers they would see this content and delete it before we wanted. By assigning icons to a manager early (and one that keeps it around for a good while) this content is unavailable for assignment to other managers and therefore can't be deleted by those lower-level managers. Note that this manager also looks for and saved stray icons - this is because stray icons seem to still be able to be used as favicons in certain cases.
• Stray URLs: This could also appear anywhere in the list since it is always deleted immediately during the sizing part of the cycle, but it's simply placed here in the order to make things less confusing. Again we wait a bit before deleting them to make sure they aren't in use.
• Stray files: These make up true stray files and incomplete downloaded content. Again they must age by 2 days before being deleted. If you have a high speed connection you may want to lower this value. If you only plan to manually run the management cycle you could even set this to zero if you don't use IE while you're using CacheSentry Pro. Unlike the original CacheSentry, this manager is set to not delete the strays until the cache is full just in case a file really is part of an incomplete web page load.
• Normal content: This is the catch-all manager. It sees both normal and offline content (because we handled both types of strays above, and as you'll see cookies below) and deletes it with no special conditions when the cache is full. If you plan to use a really small cache size (like 1 or 2 megabytes) you may want to enable the deletion age wait feature to something like 1 hour in case the content is still in use and thus avoid the annoying "file in use" error messages in the activity log.
• Old cookies: The last manager in the list. Since cookies are always immediately deleted when conditions are met, again it doesn't really matter where managers that handle cookies are in the list. (Unless of course you have multiple cookie managers, in which case you will have to figure out how to order them in relation to one another.) Again it's at the bottom of the list just to make things less confusing and separate it from the other managers.

David's default manager set

This is what I use on my own computer. It is basically the same with a few additions to handle my development environment needs:

• MSDN help files: For some reason, the MSDN help system stores everything you view in the cache, even though it's already coming straight from the hard drive! Because I don't want those files pushing out content that came from the Internet, it is the second manager in the list (right below zero-byte strays) and matches both normal and offline content and uses the name match feature to assign to it only files that start with "ms-it" in the URL.
• Local web server: I set up an Apache server on Linux in order to test my web pages. Because I really don't want content from this speedy LAN-based server pushing content out from the Internet, it also gets deleted before the other web content. It is next in the list, and again uses the pattern matching to match against all local IP addresses on my network.
• Maya doc server: Like the local web server, I don't want content that is quickly available cluttering the cache, so any URL that starts with "http://localhost:" is removed from the cache quickly. (This should also work for any local server on your system that uses the same type of URL.)
• MSDN Platform SDK .cab files: These files come from the MSDN Platform SDK site, and they are quite large - so large that it can day several days (for me :-)) to download them! So I set up an exception to the "large files" manager and content from the Platform SDK is spared from deletion for a lengthy time and is ignored from the actual cache size so they don't push out other content.
  
  

  Cool idea: If you use the Platform SDK site and want to keep a local copy of the installation files, you can use the CacheSentry Pro backup tool's name filter to back up just the .cab files. They can then be deleted until the next time you need to install another Platform SDK. This way, you can restore them to the cache, the SDK IE installer applet will see them and and you won't have to wait for all the dependent .cabs to download again. A major savings of time and bandwidth!!

Time-based manager set

This set of managers is an example of how to force content to stay in the cache for a specific amount of time. Zero-byte strays are still deleted ASAP, but large content, stray files, and normal content all must go unused (and therefore stay around) for at least 20 days before they can be considered for deletion. Icons, stray URLs and cookies are still the same as with the default manager set. It doesn't really matter how small you set your cache size to - the usable content will always stay around for at least 20 days. Plus, it may stay around longer if the cache hasn't filled up to that maximum cache size setting. If you want to use this set and have content forced to stay around longer, go through each of the managers that is set to make their content not be deleted for 20 days and increase the value. (Or lower it if you want to shorten the content lifespan.)

Manual stray cleaner

This set demonstrates how to set up CacheSentry Pro to be a manual stray file cleaner. It cleans out all of the stray files immediately. Just make sure you turn auto-management off otherwise you'll lose all of those files as soon as the first management cycle occurs! This manager set contains no other managers except for the stray cleaner, so it won't touch any other files.

Manual cookie cleaner

This set immediately cleans out your cookie folder. Again, make sure auto-management is disabled. It is basically the same as the stray cleaner above, except it looks for cookies instead of stray files for the content type.

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