Cache size

[dark_moon]

Hi.

What is the best cache size for Pale Moon? Actually i use the standard settings (1GB) and disable automatic cache management.

I have 4GB DDR2 memory, a Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550 processor and a SATA2 drive.

The 1GB cache use actually 1GB, so its full.

[Moonchild]

The standard setting for Pale Moon is 200MB - Which is plenty for any normal use.
1GB is a Firefox default which is IMHO too much (and can cause nasty pauses as cache management kicks in) and will have lots of stale content in it, just wasting your disk space.

[Edkiefer]

mine was set to 1024mb after PM 12.0 install and copy of profile over from FF 3.6, does profile have this setting as a value to get carried over ?

I lowered it now, anyway .

Edit: I just checked my 3.6 and it was set to 50mb so it wasn't the profile that did it .

OT, Does PM update addons too ?
I notice in FF3.6 there was a checkbox for addon updates but not in PM12.0 (only search engines) .I looked around but didn't see it mentioned FAQ .

Ed

[Moonchild]

mine was set to 1024mb after PM 12.0 install and copy of profile over from FF 3.6, does profile have this setting as a value to get carried over ?

I lowered it now, anyway .

Edit: I just checked my 3.6 and it was set to 50mb so it wasn't the profile that did it .

OT, Does PM update addons too ?
I notice in FF3.6 there was a checkbox for addon updates but not in PM12.0 (only search engines) .I looked around but didn't see it mentioned FAQ .

Ed

I'll have a look into it. 200 MB is the default but maybe the internal migration routines set these values to something else when converting an old profile.

The add-on update preferences have been moved out of the main preferences window into the add-on manager. By default it will check and notify you if there are add-on updates, or you can set it there to do this automatically (download&install).

[Edkiefer]

ok, thanks, I found it and I did set cache to lower 200mb, it was already at 370mb level (I cleared first , then set it lower) and restart .

Ed

[dark_moon]

Ok thanks. But why only 200MB? I mean every user have a big drive.
Pale Moon load every site, if the cache is full or the site isnt in the cache. This decreased the speed or?

And why not using the automatic cache management?

[Moonchild]

200MB will cache files for fast browsing without having the files go stale or be too outdated.
1 GB is a lot of data. The average web page size is in the order of maybe 200 kB (a lot of them less, I gather). meaning you can store 1,000 average sized pages in the 200 MB cache. That is enough, certainly for the average user, don't you think?
Having an oversized cache (and automatic cache management) causes delays and decreased speed in the browser because the cache, when full, needs to be cleaned up of old/stale items before new items can be stored. This has caused noticeable delays in Firefox when they moved to this 1GB oversized cache. Also, stale items are just a waste of space, they are re-downloaded anyway.

[Moonchild]

A followup on this: Apparently, the Firefox UX team thought it would be a good idea to set the cache size to the maximum allowable size as a user preference if the browser hasn't been run before. I'm not entirely sure what the reasoning would be there, since if you set it application specific (including Firefox's setting of 256MB by default) in your initial preferences, it gets immediately overridden with a user pref setting it to max cache.

This is, in fact, done hard-coded in C++ source code, so requires a recompile and cannot be worked around with settings.

This took some serious source tree hunting to find out, but since it's known now, it can be fixed.

See: Bug # 559942 comment 65