This is an advanced subject.
Beginners need only bother, if they have a system with very low resources and if the system feels very sluggish. The background is that OpenCPN, quite aggressively uses memory, to speed up the application, this can backfire in certain situations….
There is a simple memory management scheme, for use with systems that has limited resources.
Two modes are available, only one of which can be active at any given time.
The modes must be specified in the “opencpn.conf” file, called “opencpn.ini” in Windows and Mac.
1. Application memory limit target. Try to limit the total memory used by OCPN to the specified value, approximately. Specify this mode by:
[Settings].... MEMCacheLimit=xxx
Where xxx is memory use target in Mbytes. Overrides NCacheLimit below.
2. Open chart limit. This is the default mode under Linux, and the default value is 20 open charts at any one time.
Modify this limit by the following:
[Settings] .... NCacheLimit=yy
Where yy is the maximum number of simultaneously open charts.
Texture Settings
In Options→Display-Advanced Tab activate “Disable Full Screen Quilting” to start with.
Use OpenGL if your hardware is up to it. If you are using OpenGL on a low-spec machine, you will have better performance if you
Eventually, after steady use, your texture cache will be filled automatically in the background, and performance will increase steadily.