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Best practice regarding browser cache

Discussion in 'General Internet' started by psaulm119, 2014/04/20.

  1. 2014/04/20
    psaulm119 Lifetime Subscription

    psaulm119 Geek Member Thread Starter

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    What is the best practice regarding the browser cache? Is it letting the browser manage the cache on its own? Is it clearing it every x days, or after it gets so big? Or is it setting a limit to the cache size?

    I've heard some people say that a large cache can slow down a browser. That's why I'm asking.

    I did a quick test on my own laptop with a browser--with and without flashblock and adblocking extensions, and by far the biggest speedup occured simply when I loaded a webpage that had already been loaded into the cache. Using an adblocker did help, but not nearly as much as simply not clearing the cache. So some type of cache is better than clearing it constantly.

    But I'm still wondering, if you can get too much of a good thing.
     
  2. 2014/04/20
    James Martin

    James Martin Geek Member

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    For what it's worth, I clean my browser quite often, but that's just a personal preference.

    PC Pitstop has a good article on the subject...


    Disregard the sales pitch for PC Pitstop Optimize.
     
    Last edited: 2014/04/20

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  4. 2014/04/20
    psaulm119 Lifetime Subscription

    psaulm119 Geek Member Thread Starter

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    Hmm they suggest a cache between 10 and 100 megs. I can see that a cache of only 10 megs wouldn't contain that many cached pages. 100 megs would be better in that light. But would a cache of over that slow down the browser? I guess that is the question I posed in the OP, although I'm skeptical that the optimal cache size is that small.

    The article suggested a test, which got rather complicated....a test test with IE, and then a full test.... not sure about that.
     
  5. 2014/04/20
    James Martin

    James Martin Geek Member

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    I've ran their test many times to see what needs optimizing, although I don't install any of their software except for an ActiveX download.

    You can run the tests in Firefox, but the test requires an addon called Neptune if I remember correctly.
     
  6. 2014/04/20
    psaulm119 Lifetime Subscription

    psaulm119 Geek Member Thread Starter

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    If I ran IE as my default browser, I'm sure I could trust them and allow an Active X script. But I'm on Opera right now, and I'm not sure if the results would correlate to Opera. But I'll see if they let me in on IE. I guess it can't hurt....
     
  7. 2014/04/20
    psaulm119 Lifetime Subscription

    psaulm119 Geek Member Thread Starter

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    Interesting. After running the test, they suggested that the 63 megs in teh IE cache was too much, and should be deleted. A little popup said that broadband users shouldn't have a cache higher than 50 megs, "to minimize network traffic and disk clutter."

    Interesting, although I'm going to want to get this confirmed by forum heavyweights here before I go so far away from what I've always been told. I mean, 50 megs would'nt really keep that many sites at all in teh cache, and I know that page loads are slower with a clean cache.
     
  8. 2014/04/20
    James Martin

    James Martin Geek Member

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    I have IE 11's cache set to 100MB, and Firefox is defaulted to 75MB.

    I rarely use Internet Explorer, and my default browser (Firefox) has an addon called FasterFox Lite that helps to speed up my browsing experience.

    EDIT: In my XP days, I used to use a program called TCP Optimizer that modified the registry to allow for quicker page loading. I've never tried it on Windows 7 yet, because my new hardware is so fast compared to the former.
     
    Last edited: 2014/04/20
  9. 2014/04/20
    MrBill

    MrBill SuperGeek WindowsBBS Team Member

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    I have always used 50 MB for years and 3 days for the cache.
     
  10. 2014/04/21
    psaulm119 Lifetime Subscription

    psaulm119 Geek Member Thread Starter

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    You do this because you've noticed a slowdown if the cache gets much larger?
     
  11. 2014/04/21
    psaulm119 Lifetime Subscription

    psaulm119 Geek Member Thread Starter

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    Hmmmm one comment in a caching article, said that more important than increasing cache size, is the eviction algorithm (my new word for the day) of old cache content. The idea here is that increasing cache size won't necessarily help that much, because a video that you see quick quickly eat up the increased cache space. But if your browser is designed to evict images rather than scripts, your cache will actually have useful things in it, that will speed up your browsing across many sessions and webpages.
     
  12. 2014/04/21
    Steve R Jones

    Steve R Jones SuperGeek Staff

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    It's probably just his routine..... The slowdown isn't exactly like you have to wait days or weeks for pages to load.

    There is no one size fits all as to what you do with your cached pages... The sites that you visit often will also play a part in this....just depends on how the site is configured etc...

    There are millions of people that don't even know about cached pages etc and they surf along just fine.
     
  13. 2014/04/21
    MrBill

    MrBill SuperGeek WindowsBBS Team Member

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    No. Read someplace a looooong time ago to change it and it stuck in my head. But I can't remember what time I got out of bed this morning. :D
     
  14. 2014/04/21
    psaulm119 Lifetime Subscription

    psaulm119 Geek Member Thread Starter

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    You and me both.

    I'm open to clearing it every x days, but I'm just wondering if there is a magic number, that's all. 50-100 megs sounds very very close to the default cache size for browsers. Can't seem to find instructions on the newer versions of Opera (15 and up have a different rendering engine); Firefox IIRC was around 350 megs.
     
  15. 2014/04/21
    James Martin

    James Martin Geek Member

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    I forgot to mention that although my Firefox cache is set to 75MB, the browser is also set to automatic cache management.
     
  16. 2014/04/21
    SpywareDr

    SpywareDr SuperGeek WindowsBBS Team Member

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