Cache the Bitcoin Datadir to Improve Performance? Increase Bitcoin DB Cache Size? Bitcoin is very disk-intensive and that slows it down. It seems to flush data to disk often thus preventing proper caching. With the datadir on a RAMdisk it is much faster.
Is it possible to increase the db cache size or do something else to improve cache performance.
Of course it would be nice to keep the wallet and important data saved but I would not mind the blockchain to be heavily cached.
I'm asking mainly about Windows OS.
The very recently released bitcoin v0.6.0 has modified bdb cache settings (25 megabytes by default), and provides a way to change this via the command-line option -dbcache=N, with N a number in megabytes.

This change caused a very significant speedup for synchronizing the block chain indeed.