Firefox cache: move to sd, ramdisk or disable?

I am using Portable Firefox 3 on my AA1. Currently, I have moved its cache to the sdhc. I know that some of you just have it on a ramdisk and some of you have it disabled altogether. What is best in terms of general optimization and what are the drawbacks of having it on the ramdisk or disabled? your experience/opinions?

Cheers.

 

The drawbacks of having firefox (and windows temp directory) on the sdhc is slow write on big files which will lead to freezees when for example you try to watch a flash video or load a complex page. I have a fast sdhc and i experienced this problem.

If you move firefox cache (and most important to me windows TEMP) to a ram drive this problem is solved BUT if you try for example to watch a big flash movie ram drive will be full before you know it leading to a windows crash... Unless you allocate a large portion of AAO's RAM (bigger than 512mb) to the ram drive. Also when you reboot your AAO and try to reload a page you've already viewed you have to wait for firefox to cache it again so it will load slow.

I dont recommend disabling firefox cache because: A) flash videos (which are big files) are stored to windows temp directory and not on firefox cache and b) you need to have a REAL FAST connection so you dont have to wait every time you reload a page.

My advice: Move your user profile to the SDHC (there are many tutorials of how you do it inside this forum) and allocate around 384 mb of RAM for a Ram drive to put there firefox cache and windows temp. If you are feeling adventurous after that then enable EWF for the ultimate performance boost...

 

So do you mean that I should have the ram drive on the sdhc then move Firefox's cache and Windows temp folders to the ramdrive?

cheers

 

No i mean move your user profile (documents, application data, etc) to the SDHC and the folders TEMP, TMP and firefox cache to a RAM drive...

 

Reading the previous posts from this section and other comments on the web, I am not convinced there are real benefits in moving the user profile. So I probably won't bother. But i'll do everything else you advise.

Thanks for your help - greatly appreciated.

 

Well the most importand benefit is less SSD wear do to continuous writes to your profile... Secondly with ewf all your documents, pictures, firefox history and favorites, etc are written to the SSD so you dont have to commit before you shutdown, also you will have less memory usage... Third if something happens to your windows xp installation your files are safe to the SDHC and the only thing you have to do is to format the SSD and restore your OS without worries that you will lose your data.... Last using a fast SDHC card is better for performance than the real slow SSD of the AAO...

But if you prefer not to thats ok its not a big deal...

You are welcome mate...

 

Fine, I'll give it a thought. In the meantime, my Firefox cache is on a 384mb ram disk and I allowed a80mb cache in Firefox's options. I am not sure I've done it right since watching a youtube video is a nightmare: it buffers every 10 seconds, and there is no way you can watch it until it has loaded the whole video. Anything I'm doing wrong?

Cheers