From time to time I like to optimize a bit my Windows machine, yet mostly all I do is fine tunning, nothing really spectacular. This time while I was browsing the net and thinking about one of my old nags (browser performance loading several tabs, to more exact: Firefox loading up 20+ tabs) I realized something really simple.
Firstly though, let me explain the problem. When Firefox loads up with a lot of tabs opened since the last session (I leave tabs opened using SessionManager, I use them as a to do list for the next day) it takes very long (30-90seconds) to load them all up, mostly because firefox is reading unchanged files from its cache.
Back in the day, I’ve tried to solve this problem by saving the cache on a speedy USB stick (this way I would get much better random access time of small files but the sequential speed was really low).
As was I saying, while searching the interwebs I’ve stumbled on a nice little utility that can create RAM drives, needless to say my old idea just got better, what about a RAM drive especially for Firefox and IE cache ? It doesn’t need to be big (50Mb each would be enough) and I don’t really care about the safety of the date stored there (after all if the cache gets corrupted or lost, the browser will just redownload or a trusty CTRL+F5 would fix the problem).
It was sitting at the back of my mind for too long
Configured my Ram Drive, moved firefox and IE cache folders there and then reloaded my 20+ tabbed ff. Results ? Well, just next to amazing, everything runs snappy, but now I’ve found another bottleneck: my CPU.
Biography:
- Ram Drive - content management system