Disable Chrome cache

Derek10 · 02 Jun 2012

Hi

I want, for the sake of my netbook's battery, hard disk defrag, etc.... to disable the Google Chrome cache as it is writing to the HDD and therefore using my netbook's battery.

Is that possible? or shoud I change to Firefox/Opera for the netbook???

Many thanks :)

OldMX · 02 Jun 2012

Try with a modified shortcut to chrome.exe?

"chrome.exe" --disk-cache-size=1 --media-cache-size=1

logicearth · 02 Jun 2012

Umm...sorry but thats is just foolish. Disabling the cache will inflict more battery usage then saving. I/O over the network is a lot slower, and requires more processing then local I/O. Downloading the same images and other files (CSS, JS) with every page load will take more battery power then reading from the hard drive.

Derek10 · 02 Jun 2012

OldMX said:

Try with a modified shortcut to chrome.exe?

"chrome.exe" --disk-cache-size=1 --media-cache-size=1

Thanks but those flasg don't seem to work here Chrome 21 dev

logicearth said:

Umm...sorry but thats is just foolish. Disabling the cache will inflict more battery usage then saving. I/O over the network is a lot slower, and requires more processing then local I/O. Downloading the same images and other files (CSS, JS) with every page load will take more battery power then reading from the hard drive.

I thought Chrome or any browser stored those data on RAM for an session so it wouldn't download again unless restarted (thats why it uses lots of ram when many tabs opened, I think).

MilesAhead · 02 Jun 2012

You cuold try
--disk-cache-dir Use a specific disk cache location, rather than one derived from the UserDatadir. ↪
--disk-cache-size Forces the maximum disk space to be used by the disk cache, in bytes. ↪

and put the cache on a small ram disk. If that's all you have on the ram disk you can set it to discard everything on shutdown. In fact it may speed up your performance.

I used Data Ram Ramdisk not too long ago. It wasn't difficult to set up. Here's a list:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_RAM_disk_software

You can run FireFox Portable completely out of a ram disk. Chrome may be a bit more problematic.

logicearth · 03 Jun 2012

Derek10 said:

I thought Chrome or any browser stored those data on RAM for an session so it wouldn't download again unless restarted (thats why it uses lots of ram when many tabs opened, I think).

Nope, doesn't work that way.

Derek10 · 03 Jun 2012

MilesAhead said:

You cuold try
--disk-cache-dir Use a specific disk cache location, rather than one derived from the UserDatadir. ↪
--disk-cache-size Forces the maximum disk space to be used by the disk cache, in bytes. ↪

and put the cache on a small ram disk. If that's all you have on the ram disk you can set it to discard everything on shutdown. In fact it may speed up your performance.

I used Data Ram Ramdisk not too long ago. It wasn't difficult to set up. Here's a list:
List of RAM disk software - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

You can run FireFox Portable completely out of a ram disk. Chrome may be a bit more problematic.

Many thanks, seems that using the --disk-cache-size alongside the --disk-cache-dir worked fine here on Chrome Canary. I will try some RAM disk software of the link, and see if better or no that cache disabled. :)

logicearth said:

Derek10 said:

I thought Chrome or any browser stored those data on RAM for an session so it wouldn't download again unless restarted (thats why it uses lots of ram when many tabs opened, I think).

Nope, doesn't work that way.

With Chrome, yes, I've tested it.