[Article] Speed Up Firefox by Moving Your Cache to RAM, No RAM Disk Required
kes
"Since your computer can access data in RAM faster than on a hard drive,
moving cached data to RAM can improve your page load times. In Firefox,
all you need to do to move your caches to RAM is open up about:config
and make a few tweaks."
Q-Does it work, or are there downsides?
Fox on the run
> From Lifehacker site
>
> "Since your computer can access data in RAM faster than on a hard drive,
> moving cached data to RAM can improve your page load times. In Firefox,
> all you need to do to move your caches to RAM is open up about:config
> and make a few tweaks."
>
>
> Q-Does it work, or are there downsides?
If you have the spare RAM (in other words forget it if you have an
older system as odds are you are already taxing its resources), it
would certainly allow FF to access cache faster. The downside is you
use more RAM than leaving cache on the hard drive. And when you exit
Firefox the RAM is released and your cache is lost. So if you start
up Firefox again 10 seconds later, you have no cache again. Thus if
you visit a site you just visited 2 minutes earlier before closing
down FF, that won't be in cache to assist FF because it was lost when
you exited Firefox.
If you use the hard drive, then space is likely not an issue (people
will run out of RAM before they'll run out of storage). And your
cache is not lost between sessions. The down side is it's not as fast
as accessing it from RAM (but will the average user really notice the
difference in speed? quite possibly not).
It's not difficult to try so you have little to lose by trying it out
for a while (unless you have lots of cache built up already that you
don't want to lose). If you do try it, post back with your
impressions. Personally I like to keep my cache from one session to
the next so FF can load from it the next time around. But I may try
it just for the fun of it.
JB
Ron K.
A flash drive or solid state drive could be the best of both.
--
Ron K.
Who is General Failure, and why is he searching my HDD?
Kernel Restore reported Major Error used BSOD to msg the enemy!
Ron Hunter
at least there is no seek time, or rotational latency to contend with.
Poutnik
db3ab6...@i32g2000pri.googlegroups.com>, jjrbo...@gmail.com says...
> If you use the hard drive, then space is likely not an issue (people
> will run out of RAM before they'll run out of storage). And your
> cache is not lost between sessions. The down side is it's not as fast
> as accessing it from RAM (but will the average user really notice the
> difference in speed? quite possibly not).
>
I guess the bottleneck is not disk access,
but speed of processing of page files/rendering,
or in case of pictures processing of image data.
--
Poutnik
Poutnik
kil...@gisco.net says...
>
>
> A flash drive or solid state drive could be the best of both.
OTOH, using flash based disks for temporary storage
of frequently modified data is not optimal
for limited write cycle lifetime.
Performance was addressed in another post.
--
Poutnik
The best depends on how the best is defined.
Ron Hunter
disk caching can deliver improved performance. If you have a slow HD,
and a fast line, disk caching can actually slow your displaying of data.
If you have both a fast HD, and a fast line, you will likely see
little, or no difference with or without a disk cache, but you WILL save
a lot of disk seeking, etc., by turning off the disk cache.
I have been running that way for several years with no problems I have
noticed. There MAY be some extensions, or function I don't use that are
negatively impacted by lack of a disk cache, so tread cautiously until
you see how it may work for you.
Ron Hunter
> In article<peadnVg3gP8M10PR...@mozilla.org>,
> kil...@gisco.net says...
>>
>>
>> A flash drive or solid state drive could be the best of both.
>
> OTOH, using flash based disks for temporary storage
> of frequently modified data is not optimal
> for limited write cycle lifetime.
>
> Performance was addressed in another post.
>
how many times you have to write to that byte in order to use that up.
And most flash drives have protection against that problem built in. In
short, it isn't something one needs to worry about these days.
Poutnik
rphu...@charter.net says...
>
> Hummm. If your flash device has a 500,000 write cycle lifetime, think
> how many times you have to write to that byte in order to use that up.
> And most flash drives have protection against that problem built in. In
> short, it isn't something one needs to worry about these days.
Well, multilevel ( more than 2 charge levels ) flash memory cells
have up to 10000 cycles only. ( or in this order ).
And their write performance is questinable.
E.g. only fast one are considered worthy
Readyboost to be implemented on.
Protection is based on wear leveling across all cells.
--
Poutnik
Poutnik
rphu...@charter.net says...
>
> >
> IF you have a fast HD, and IF you have a slow internet connection, then
> disk caching can deliver improved performance. If you have a slow HD,
> and a fast line, disk caching can actually slow your displaying of data.
> If you have both a fast HD, and a fast line, you will likely see
> little, or no difference with or without a disk cache, but you WILL save
> a lot of disk seeking, etc., by turning off the disk cache.
It should be very slow HD and very fast connection to be comparable.
Furthermore, one knows download speed is seldom equal to link speed,
especially for fast ones.
Data processing was not mentioned, decreasing gain from RAM access,
keeping loss from network waitings.
--
Poutnik
Fox on the run
>
> "Since your computer can access data inRAMfaster than on a hard drive,
> moving cached data toRAMcan improve your page load times. InFirefox,
> all you need to do to move your caches toRAMis open up about:config
> and make a few tweaks."
>
>
> Q-Does it work, or are there downsides?
I know this thread is a bit dated now and I originally replied to it.
But I just read at http://kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.cache.memory.enable
how this preference really works (it is also the one that is mentioned
in the LifeHacker article). The article suggests that you can use
this to cache to RAM instead of to disk. However this preference is
set to true by default. So it's already caching to RAM. But that
doesn't mean there is no cache to the hard drive. The
kb.mozillazine.org article states the following:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
When a page is loaded, it can be cached so it doesn't need to be re-
rendered to be redisplayed. This preference controls whether to use
memory to cache decoded images, chrome (application user interface
elements), and secure (https) pages. browser.cache.memory.capacity
controls the maximum amount of memory to use.
Possible values and their effects
true
Allow decoded images, chrome, and secure pages to be cached in memory.
(Default)
false
Don't cache decoded images, chrome, and secure pages in memory.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
So as we see, that preference is on by default and is not used to
cache everything to RAM vs to hard drive as a means of speeding things
up. The article in LifeHacker errs in how this preference works. It
works as described above.
JB
kes
Thanks, yes - when I was playing around I also discovered that the value
of browser.cache.memory.capacity was already set to 'true'. So I left it
alone.
jac0b
Directions to do so are as follows:
Mozilla Firefox
Firefox settings can be changed from the configuration panel (about:config) where a few settings will need to be changed.
Change the cache’s directory, where the G: drive should be changed to reflect the location of your RAM disk. If the key doesn’t exist, create a new String.
Key / Value
Code:
browser.cache.disk.parent_directory
Code:
G:\
Change the cache size. In bytes; the example below is 200MB.
Key / Value
Code:
browser.cache.disk.capacity
Code:
209715200
> > Q-Does it work, or are there downsides?
>
> If you have the spare RAM (in other words forget it if you have an
> older system as odds are you are already taxing its resources), it
> would certainly allow FF to access cache faster. The downside is you
> use more RAM than leaving cache on the hard drive. And when you exit
> Firefox the RAM is released and your cache is lost. So if you start
> up Firefox again 10 seconds later, you have no cache again. Thus if
> you visit a site you just visited 2 minutes earlier before closing
> down FF, that won't be in cache to assist FF because it was lost when
> you exited Firefox.
>