I started working in the IT some 40 years ago. At the time I worked with
16 bit computers that had a glorious 256kB of memory, and those were not
PC's because at the time there were no PC's.
One thing I learned very quickly, if you want to speed up thing on a
computer, give the programs, utilities etc. more memory. Sounds logical,
but from personal experience I can assure you that many professionals
don't have a clue. You have no idea how many how many bad performing
computer systems I have seen over the years, that sometimes were not
using more then 80% of their memory. Changing a few parameters for
database caches etc. , and the problems were gone.
In the past computers did not have much memory, it was expensive, and
with for instance 32 bit computers total memory is limited to appr. 3.5
GB. If the computer only has 2 GB of memory, and the computer needs
more, it will start swapping to disk, using the disk as a kind of memory
extension. That is a very common thing to do with operating system.
Applications can do the same, if they need more memory then they have,
they may also start using disk space as memory if they are set up to do
so. Netscape > Mozilla > Seamonkey started life as a 16 bit program, now
the official versions are 32 bit, and the coming, but still experimental
versions are 64 bit.
Seamonkey is also set up to use disk space as cache, and the size of
that cache can be set in the preferences if you please to do so. That
works fine for the 32 bit and the 64 bit version of Seamonkey.
However, there's also a memory cache in RAM, and the size of that cache
can only be changed by tweaking the configuration file. I've noticed
that increasing the memory cache can certainly increase the speed of
Seamonkey, and can also avoid freezing problems etc.
That's why in my opinion it would be a good idea to make a entry in the
preferences for setting the memory cache, and certainly for the 64 bit
versions. With a 64 bit Windows it's quite easy to have lots of memory,
so why not use it?
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