Firefox: faster browser by moving cache to RAM…any downsides?

Question

Read a DownloadSquad article that recommended an option for Mozilla Firefox that moves cache to RAM.

I could see why it would speed things up; why isn't it on by default then?

Is there a downside?

Answer 1

Two reasons I would guess why it's not on by default:

• People already complain about how much memory Firefox uses.
• Each process has a maximum amount of memory it can (readily) allocate. Using some of that for a cache makes it more likely to hit that limit, which might cause the process to crash. (Only really an issue for 32-bit, but that's still probably most people.)

These are exacerbated when Firefox "leaks memory", as it apparently can (which leads to the first issue).

As long as Firefox "fits in memory" by itself, I don't see much of a downside. The OS manages how much of each process's memory is in RAM, and when necessary, pages to disk. So worst case, your Firefox cache goes to disk. If you allocate too little for the memory cache, you might see performance suffer, since it will be forced to fetch over the network, which is slower than disk.

Interaction with other processes and what gets paged when is hard to generalize in a "rule of thumb" way. So if you're using other programs along with Firefox, which is now definitely using more memory, you might see some effects there.

But go ahead and try it.

Answer 2

Partial downside is that it will eat up more RAM, depending on how many tabs you have open...Also, if you have a lot of tabs open, and many programs running, Firefox will likely slow the opening/refreshing of webpages...

same article at Lifehacker.com: http://lifehacker.com/5687850/speed-up-firefox-by-moving-your-cache-to-ram-no-ram-disk-required