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Internet / Re: Firefox and disk cache - not using it, but why?
« on: March 02, 2026, 02:30:01 am »
Dave!
No worries there, to be honest this actually prompted me to investigate some FF aspects that have been relegated to the "set & forget" category...and yeah, as can be seen that's been at least a couple of years now, probably longer actually.
For everyone else's benefit who might be reading this thread, I did the following:
1) shut off the DISK cache by setting browser.cache.disk.enable=FALSE
2) set the browser.cache.memory.capacity=65536 (which is 64M, compared to the original value of "-1", which was providing me with rougly 26M)
- this last one you really need to play around with as the "-1" setting uses a FF algorithm to determine the target size given your available memory
Anyways, truth be told, FF is much more responsive now!
...and maybe I shouldn't be 
Dave, regardless, I appreciate your feedback on this for w/o it I would have spent more hours investigating things further thinking that something has gone awry on my machine!
Thank you again sir.
Quite possible I broke something over the years with security fixes from tenfour, changes to compile under the newer GCC etc, as I never checked the cache.
No worries there, to be honest this actually prompted me to investigate some FF aspects that have been relegated to the "set & forget" category...and yeah, as can be seen that's been at least a couple of years now, probably longer actually.
For everyone else's benefit who might be reading this thread, I did the following:
1) shut off the DISK cache by setting browser.cache.disk.enable=FALSE
2) set the browser.cache.memory.capacity=65536 (which is 64M, compared to the original value of "-1", which was providing me with rougly 26M)
- this last one you really need to play around with as the "-1" setting uses a FF algorithm to determine the target size given your available memory
Anyways, truth be told, FF is much more responsive now!
...and maybe I shouldn't be 
...It does work to a degree, after shutting the browser down and restarting some pages load from cache, though not as many as do under newer SM on Linux. SM, FF and TB share the code.
I have no idea where the cache code resides and don't feel motivated to explore the issue as it is working well enough in this broadband era.
Dave, regardless, I appreciate your feedback on this for w/o it I would have spent more hours investigating things further thinking that something has gone awry on my machine!
Thank you again sir.