OK, so the "community professionals" disagree on the importance of the Raw Cache size. What are we to make of that? Pick you poison. The same "professional" I quoted on the Raw Cache verified Rob's point about the importance of setting large enough preview sizes. Was he wrong about that, too? How are we to know?
Dueling authorities don't help us much. In the end we are still left to stumble our own way to a solution - or not. At least I actually quoted and provided links to the sources I was using. We can only trust that TK2142 remembers his sources' comments correctly, since he gives us no way to verify his information. This doesn't make him wrong, of course, but it doesn't make him right either. At best it's a toss up.
As for his helping "to demystify the role and significance of the ACR Cache," I'd say not so much. In fact, it wasn't clear we were even talking about the same thing. ACR refers to Adobe Camera Raw, which is a Photoshop plug-in more or less comparable to Lightroom. As it happens, I just checked, and Photoshop and Lightroom use the same Raw Cache folder (as does Bridge); if you change the cache in one program it will automatically change it in the others. Still, in the Lightroom preferences it is referred to as Camera Raw Cache; in Photoshop's Camera Raw preferences it's also called the Camera Raw Cache, and in Bridge as well. So it would appear that his use of the term ACR Cache is, at best, imprecise and, at worst, misleading. As a result I have to say, before TK2142 can "demystify" anything he needs to get his terminology straight. He may still be correct about the relative importance of the Camera Raw Cache, but before we can accept that he knows what he's talking about, we need some indication that he does, in fact, know what he's talking about. By mislabelling the folder at the very center of the discussion, and neglecting to reference the sources he cites, he undermines his own credibility, at least to some degree.
The biggest problem with his demystifying, though, is that he uses straw man arguments to make himself look good. No one I read or quoted said anything about making the Raw Cache large enough "such that LR can always access a pre-rendered version." As a result, debunking his argument is quite simple: a small cache will retain a small number of images; a large cache will retain substantially more. How big the cache should be depends on your individual workflow, not on some mythical "always." And how much the cache size affects your efficiency depends on how you divide your time between the Library module, where the Raw Cache has no significant role, and the Develop module where it plays a larger part. By glossing over these distinctions, TK2142 attempts to diminish the importance of the Raw Cache, but the gloss merely adds more imprecision to his arguments.
For most of us, the challenge in Lightroom performance is to adjust the settings we use to enable us to work as efficiently as possible, given our individual needs and preferences. Arguments about the relative importance of something like the Camera Raw Cache are themselves relative, especially if we accept that the "experts" disagree. While it's possible to glean a few grains of truth from TK2142's discussion, it's far more difficult than it needs to be. Given that I claim no particular expertise of my own (hence my references to those far more well informed than I), it's not clear who he's contending against. Argument for its own sake, perhaps?
This is precisely the kind of dissension that undermined the earlier thread on the same subject (Lightroom 3 performance problems). Perhaps I should have left TK2142's remarks alone (and I'll no doubt hear from you all if that's so), but they muddied things up so dramatically that, in my opinion, at the risk of some contention, they should not be allowed to go unchallenged. If he has some credible authority to cite, some factual argument to make, let him do so. Otherwise, sewing doubt for the fun of it informs and helps no one.
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