Ron Hunter wrote:
On 1/1/2013 4:02 PM, MCBastos wrote:
Ant wrote:
Hello.
Does the web browsers keep the most used cached files on the disks? Do
the least used one get thrown one when more room is needed?
Thank you in advance. :)
By default most web browsers keep a disk cache of recently-acessed
pages, images and such on disk. Exact details depend on the particular
browser, but:
- On average, caches are pretty big, allowing for several days or even
weeks of browsing;
- The simplest algorithm used to determine which pages should be purged
is based on "last time this was needed": if cache hits the size limit,
the first pages to be purged are the ones which haven't been accessed
the longest. There are other, more sophisticated algorithms -- I don't
know if any browser uses them, but I have a feeling that, due to the
factors listed below and the large size of the average cache, the gains
should be minimal.
- Pages on servers are usually tagged with a "time to live," meaning
that browsers will disregard cached pages older than that time (or at
least they should). So your browser might fetch a page again even if you
visited it pretty recently, if the time-to-live has expired. Some pages
are tagged with a time-to-live of 0, meaning browsers shouldn't cache
them at all.
- Encrypted pages are not cached (or at least they should not be).
MCBastos
Another aspect to the disk cache is that if you have a reasonably fast
broadband connection, you will probably slow the rendering of pages
other than the very most complex graphics dependent ones by waiting for
disk search, and access, as opposed to just getting them online. I
normally turn disk caching off.
I run with caches set to zero myself. Never noticed a problem.
--
- Rufus
_______________________________________________
support-seamonkey mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/support-seamonkey
