User blog:Martirsadota/Fix Yer Woes: Selective Cache Clearing

=Intro=

Ever met a ghost ship? You know, the one that just shows up as a blank piece of nothing, no sprite appearing at all, takes several seconds to do an attack, stays like a ghost everytime you meet her, stuff like that?



Or have you experienced one of your kanmusu's lines getting cut off way before it's supposed to finish, and staying that way?

This one's for you.

=Why Ghost Ships?=

To understand why Ghost Ships (and other maladies) exist, one must understand the existence of the cache. If you already do (and I'm sure you do), you may skip the next paragraphs.

The cache is like a temporary holding ground for files grabbed from the Internet so that your browser/KCV can quickly grab it again whenever it is needed. For instance, if your browser grabbed the image files of I-kyuu every time you do your 1-1 sparkle runs, it would:
 * introduce slight to massive delays before the battle starts as the browser grabs the file(s);
 * push you closer to your data cap (for those who are in one; remember, small things eventually add up);
 * hammer the Kancolle server with redundant traffic;
 * get you banned (maybe).

So instead of grabbing it off the Internet whenever it is needed, the browser would only grab it once, store it in your computer, and consult that copy whenever that particular file is needed.

And where is that copy stored? You guessed it—the cache.

Now the problem here is that the browser trusts the contents of the cache. There are particular instances (quite common to people in Third World developing countries with derpy Internets) where the file gets horribly mangled (corrupted in slightly more techy parlance) due to connection errors yet the browser would still treat it as a good copy.

Hence the rise of the Ghost Ships.

To fix this, we have to force the browser to get clean copies the files in question. To do this, we clear the cache. With the (mangled) local copy vaporized, the browser is now forced to grab the files again, which is what we want.

...well, not exactly. Clearing the cache nukes everything in the cache; the after-effects of such an action are familiar to anybody after a game update: the five-minute or so stare at the loading screen, tons of blank kanmusu images in the Formation/Resupply/etc screens, delays in opening the Formation/Resupply/etc screens, and other delays as the browser grabs a ton of files, in addition to the one that was causing our woes in the first place, anew.

Wouldn't it be nice if we could just nuke the offending file, and leave everything else intact?

Enter Selective cache clearing.

=Selective What?=

That's the idea here: Nuke what needs to be nuked in the cache, and leave everything else intact. I'm pretty sure that there are tools for this, but in the following paragraphs there will be a short walk-through of the rough-and-ready technique, which requires no tools save Windows Explorer (yes, Windows-only tutorial; sorry, 'nix guys).

=Now, Nuke It!=

Let's give it a go, shall we?

Step 1: Open the Cache
To nuke the target in the cache, we need to know where is the cache. How can you kill the boss if you can't get to it?

Navigate to the cache. Windows 7 users can try ; peeps on Windows 8.x or 10 can have a peek at. Alternatively, you may:




 * 1) Open the Start Menu. Search for  . Click Internet Options in the results that appear.
 * 2) On the Internet Options dialog, under the General tab > Browsing history, click the Settings button.
 * 3) On the Website Data Settings dialog that appears, click the View Files button.

Anyway, if you did it right, you should be staring at a window that looks like this: