Forum Home
Press F1
 
Thread ID: 32831 2003-04-29 06:57:00 Create a Ramdrive to speed browsing flying_green_leprachaun (1767) Press F1
Post ID Timestamp Content User
139979 2003-04-29 06:57:00 I was wondering how to create a ram drive & cache the browser history there? so I can speed up browsing.
Im currrently using Mozilla & Im not quite sure where the history is located, also there are some cookies that I want to keep, does a Ramdrive delete everything on shutdown?
or does it store it permanently?
flying_green_leprachaun (1767)
139980 2003-04-29 07:00:00 A RAM Drive won't speed up browsing.

Yes a RAM drive deletes everything on shutdown, unless you transfer everything off the RAMdrive onto your HDD before you shutdown.

Mike.
Mike (15)
139981 2003-04-29 07:14:00 well, the deletion could be considered a bonus in some instances, but why is the ramdrive not faster? Ram is accessable faster than a hard drive... flying_green_leprachaun (1767)
139982 2003-04-29 08:24:00 Your internet browsing isn't slowed by the speed of the hard drive - the harddrive (just liked the RAM) will always run faster than your internet connection (included Jetstream etc.), so the bottleneck is always your connection. So having a RAMDrive isn't going to speed it up at all - it just speeds up the loading of pre-cached pages, which if you're having to re-download everytime you surf due to the fact that your cache is being cleared everytime you restart (being in RAM) it's going to be even slower.

Mike.
Mike (15)
139983 2003-04-29 08:46:00 If you still want to try for speed, increasing the size of browsers memory cache would be a better way (entering "about:cache" into the address bar will show you some stats). But I've never noticed any gain over the default size.

You could argue that a ram drive would actually slow things down because its preventing the memory from being used more effectively by your operating system for its own disk cache, which speeds access to all files. And in the worst case causing swapping to disk if there is not enough memory left to hold all active programmes.
bmason (508)
139984 2003-04-29 09:37:00 I have used a Ram Drive with Netscape(old model) specifically on the cache and it does speed it up. Don't ask me why. I used XMSDSK which is free. I have not used it for a while as it limits the size of downloads, plus Opera already uses a similar system without this limitation. Rod ger (316)
139985 2003-04-29 09:44:00 You'd honestly be better off using your ISP's Proxy Server, and adjusting the IE Settings...
Click:
-Tools
-Internet Options

Play around with Cache/Stored Page settings in there :-)
Chilling_Silently (228)
139986 2003-04-29 20:59:00 what about cachesentry (www.mindspring.com) which seems ok and says it fixes some caching problems... Trev0 (1995)
139987 2003-04-30 00:06:00 cachesentry does help fix a few problems with IE's caching.

a ramdrive will help browser speed to a point. firstly you still have to download the origanal web page for it to be stored in cache. however when you go to eiw that web pae again a lot of the graphics will be displayed straight from the cache. however before any browser will display the page it has to check to see if the web page doc has changed and if so download the new one. once its downloaded the rest will come from the cache (if it holds it) or download them.

the cache is notheing more than a stock pile of small files which takes a while to search through to find the pics/etc required for a page. the ramdrive will make that searching faster.

however i can think of far better things to use RAM for than to hold internet cache. also it will proberly hold it ALL the time which is not very usefull(system slow down due to ram being full, unless you can make the ramdrive start and stop whenever you use the browser).

personally i would just use a good browser that has a decent cache system. the other trick is to not make the cache to big. IE is REALLY bad for this. for eg....having a 400meg cache wil make the browser take longer to find the pics in the cache than it would to download them off the net with a good dailup connection!
tweak'e (174)
139988 2003-04-30 03:06:00 I would guess that the way to get speed is to get a fast browser. A standard approach is to say: "the larger the code is, the slower it runs".

A browser which takes 3 MB of disk will run faster than one which takes over 100 MB. :D

The documentation for the arachne browser recommends use of a ram disk if you have a lot of memory (that is, more than 2MB of RAM :D ). They document how to do it. But they wrote for slow old small computers.

I used to use a ram disk to speed up DOS ... just loaded COMMAND.COM
and a few batch files in it, so didn't need to save anything before shutdown. That worked well.
Graham L (2)
1 2