SSDs and cache location

[docchris]

Hi

I use a SSD as my main Windows disk.

It would be useful to easily be able to reset the caches directory etc to use another disk to reduce wear on the SSD.

Although I have managed to do this with Firefox (not that easy for an ordinary user) by changing about file, I can't get this to work with Pale Moon.

It would be useful (and I guess easy) for you to implement this in the options dialogs, or even within the setup procedure.

I am impressed with the speed of Pale Moon. I find Firefox after a while slows right, and I have to close and restart it, which why I want to change.

Many thanks

Chris

[dark_moon]

Welcome to the forum!

Uhm you can clear the cache in options - extented - network

[Moonchild]

A quick DDG search landed me on this howto/article which has the info you need.
http://www.essayweb.net/miscellany/firefox_cache.shtml

[jangdonggun1234]

I suggest you move your cache to RAM, very easy with Palemoon: http://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=3655

[Moonchild]

I suggest you move your cache to RAM, very easy with Palemoon: http://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=3655

I don't suggest this, since it makes the whole point of a disk cache moot if tossed away every restart.

[ron_1]

As I fairly recently got a new computer with a SSD, and put in my old hard drive as a secondary drive, I've been reading this thread with much interest, and got two questions.

By changing the cache directory over to a platter drive, how much of the life of the SSD will be saved? (This is probably too general of a question so I'll also ask, "Is it worth the bother to change it?")

Will doing so slow down the browsing experience, i.e., will it cause longer loading times?

Note: My questions are concerning changing the cache to a platter drive, not RAM.

[Moonchild]

By changing the cache directory over to a platter drive, how much of the life of the SSD will be saved? (This is probably too general of a question so I'll also ask, "Is it worth the bother to change it?")

Probably an insignificant amount, unless you have a really old generation SSD. The disk cache is most intensively used to read from, which causes no wear on an SSD. The elements stored in it are generally static with long expiration times. In addition, Pale Moon does not store particularly large files in the disk cache (which would be the most wasteful for an SSD) unlike some other browsers. The question "should I bother?" in my opinion should be answered with a solid "no".

Will doing so slow down the browsing experience, i.e., will it cause longer loading times?

SSDs have much higher transfer speeds than a platter drive and access times are very low. Any delay caused by reading data from the cache can be considered irrelevant. On a slow platter drive, this may be noticeable, but YMMV since it depends a lot on many factors, including server response time to check if files have changes/expired or downloading dynamic content, and existing filesystem caching done by the OS.

[idimitro]

One more vote for the "don't bother" option. I have been using SSDs for a couple of years now and the amount of data that is written to the disk during normal home/office usage is negligible. On my home PC after 2 years I have less than 10TB written, so really don't bother.