Ruby using the Gosu framework: why it runs slow first time?

Question

I'm creating a Ruby game using the Gosu framework. All good.

Sometimes, when I run the game, it has some kind of slow startup, and probably it will be rather slow during the whole game. So I close it and... open it again. It is very likely that it will startup quickly and the whole game will run smoothly and fast.

Why is that? What is this phenomenon? Is it faster because of some cache stored or whatever since the first run? (But why would cache be stored? If the app dies, I would expect no references at all etc...)

Ruby, Windows 7.

Answer 1

Windows will wait until that memory is needed for something else before paging out your game's files. But when it does, they will have to be reloaded from the hard drive, which is le expensive.