cache.disk ?

[Moonchild]

Really?? PM doesn't automatically manage the disk cache??

Is this something Pale Moon specific? And what about the memory cache then?

Pale Moon manages the disk cache (meaning it does maintenance on it to manage the cache properly), but it doesn't dynamically grow it like Firefox does (which can and will on many systems grow to 1 GB). Instead, Pale Moon sets a hard limit of 200 MB by default, which is a sane choice all things considered (stale elements, cache maintenance overhead, etc.) that provides a smooth browsing experience for just about everyone.

[Hoggyy]

Oh - so you don't recommend bigger than 200MB.. I usually change it to either 1024MB or 2048MB.

So you think making it that big could actually slow things down?
If that's the case then I'll change them back to 200MB then.

And if that could be a better choice for my ancient WinXP-32 machines, could a bigger cache be appropriate for my new machine (which I think is listed in my sig).

I'm also curious on how to make PM64 make the best use out of my 8GB or RAM of that new machine.


Thanks.

[Moonchild]

Indeed, I don't recommend larger than 200MB unless you very regularly visit pages with many large images that would be better pulled from the cache.
By the way, 1024MB is the ceiling in the Mozilla code - setting it to anything larger will not make a difference.

A bigger cache is not recommended regardless of the machine you run it on, unless, as stated above, your typical browsing behavior would benefit from it.

Using more memory:
Setting browser.cache.memory.capacity to 65536 in about:config will reserve 64MB of RAM for decoded images, messages and chrome elements. Larger is not recommended because the types of data cached are likely never going to reach any higher limit.
Actual content caching is always done to disk, so if you want to have the equivalent of that in RAM, you should use a RAM disk and point the cache root to the RAM disk.

[dark_moon]

The standard setting for this entry is -1 under pale moon
What make this value?

But a ram disk only save the files until the pc shutdown or? So the cache is after a reboot clear and pale moon need to load all files again.

[Moonchild]

The standard setting for this entry is -1 under pale moon
What make this value?

See: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.cache.memory.capacity

But a ram disk only save the files until the pc shutdown or? So the cache is after a reboot clear and pale moon need to load all files again.

That depends on the ram disk you use. Most that are available will have an option to commit the contents to disk upon shutdown and reload from disk upon boot. Also, if you have long(er) Windows sessions it will pull things from the disk cache (ram disk cache) when browsing; in fact, revisiting pages or reloading pages often pulls things from the cache that are no longer kept in memory in the browser, even within the same session.

[dark_moon]

Thanks.

Hmm and why you recommend 65536KB for this? In the mozilla link is the max 32768KB

Ok i will try some ram disk programms.

[Moonchild]

Hmm and why you recommend 65536KB for this? In the mozilla link is the max 32768KB

The max for auto-detect is 32 MB - doesn't mean that a larger one wouldn't help more in the cases where it might spike; 64MB really is into the theoretical as far as use goes, so anything larger is pointless. Call it "an educated setting".

[dark_moon]

Ah ok. Thanks

I try a ram disk but i dont see a better performance. Only benchmarks show a little bit more speed, but we all now benchmarks ...

[Moonchild]

I try a ram disk but i dont see a better performance.

Then your content is likely already properly cached by windows itself, and the cache is not the bottleneck for you.

[Hoggyy]

I've started to use a ram disk too for the 'disk' cache (DataRam's free one) formatted with exFAT (4 or 8k allocation units). I also don't notice a huge speed improvement. I do want to try imDisk's version which is supposed to be direct IO and one of the fastest, but It's not as easy to configure as Dataram's.

I also notice that the hard drive light still blinks, which I thought it wasn't supposed to do that... So I'm not sure if it's ONLY accessing the RAMdrive or is something else that's downloading still going to the physical disk??? Should the hard-drive light still blink for accesses to a ramdrive? (i.e. Does it usually blink for accesses to ALL drives listed in 'my computer'?)


Historical note: I used to have a RAMdisk back when using my Commodore AMIGA 4000, since I had a whopping 256MB of ram! 8-O
Also interesting was that most RAMdisk programs were automatically able to survive a reboot, and be used to do a boot from them very early in the startup-sequence. Unfortunately, I don't think any Windows versions survive a reboot - only that copy-to-img and copy-from-img stuff. :-/ Well - at least I notice that process to be *VERY* quick on Windows, so that's good.