I've been using Netscape / Mozilla / Seamonkey since Netscape 2.0 on
Windows 95 or 98. When I moved from Windows Vista to Windows 7, I of
course went to the 64 bit version. It finally removed the 4 GB limit of
the operating system.
One 64 bit operating system, I would like to see 64 bit applications,
certainly when an application can profit from using more than 4 GB of
memory.
However, Seamonkey was still a 32 bit application, and the official
versions still are. Now I like to have many tabs open, and the 32 bit
version of Seamonkey regularly crashed when I had to may tabs open. That
points to memory problems, so I was pleasantly when 64 bit versions of
Seamonkey appeared, not official versions, but test versions. Finally
that 4 GB limit is gone, so I thought. Although the 64 bit version was a
bit better, its still crashed quite often. So I increased the disk
cache. It seem to improve things a bit, but not as much as I hoped for.
And then finally I found the parameter to increase the memory cahce of
Seamonkey, and that really made a big improvement.
Bill Gianopoulos has a web site with 64 bit Windows versions of Seamonkey:
http://www.wg9s.com/
I'm using version 2.53 at the moment.
I'm very grateful for him and all the other Seamonkey developers for
there effort in producing these builds.
I've set the following cache parameters with about:config :
1. browser.cache.use_new_backend = 1 (true)
This activates a 'new' cache mechanism, that seems to be faster and more
stable than the old one. It is unclear why this isn't the default
setting. I've been using it for a very long time now.
2. browser.cache.memory.capacity = 4194304 (4 GB)
This sets the *maximum* memory capacity of the cache to 4 GB. It does
*not* mean that Seamonkey will always use 4 GB of cache memory, it
merely means that the cache memory is allowed to grow up to 4 GB *if*
Seamonkey needs it. For that to happen there must be many, many tabs open.
3. browser.cache.disk.enable = 0 (false)
This setting *disables* the disk cache. After I made this setting,
Seamonkey became extremely fast compared with an active disk cache.
However, keep in mind that you should only use this setting after
increasing the memory capacity of the cache.
For some reason about:cache does not give any useful information with
these cache settings. That may have something to do with the new backend
setting.
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