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Running without Internet cache

F

Fike

Senior member
Howdy Folks,
I have recently recovered my laptop from a file corruption in the boot kernel. After getting the system back up, I discovered that the drive was horribly fragmented--which can be an indicator of risk for file curruption. I defragmented and all seems to be well.

I understand that the internet cache for IE can be a major contributor to fragmentation of the drive. I was considering turning the cache off to avoid this problem.

I have been running portable firefox on my USB memory stick for months now, and it doesn't cache files at all. I haven't found the performance to be bad--thus my idea to just stop caching IE too.
 
Firefox still caches images.. it just saves it all in your RAM. Were otherwise it would have cache in ram and your disk.

Fragmentation won't cause file corruption per say.. it just reduces performance. But if you have a crash it may increase the chance of file corruption, or maybe increase the severity of it.

I don't think that the cache will cause much problems. Just remember to clean it out every once and a while I guess.
 
I don't notice any diminished performance in portable Firefox which is using RAM for cache, so why would anyone with broadband want to put their hard drive through the abuse of thousands of little files.

I agree that the fragmentation itself wouldn't _Cause_ corruption, but it certainly increases your susceptability of a bad crash during a write to the hard drive boot recrod (or whatever it is you call the memory address listing for files on an HD).

Is the cache a relic like modems that should be eliminated from our modern systems?
 
Originally posted by: Fike
I don't notice any diminished performance in portable Firefox which is using RAM for cache, so why would anyone with broadband want to put their hard drive through the abuse of thousands of little files.

I agree that the fragmentation itself wouldn't _Cause_ corruption, but it certainly increases your susceptability of a bad crash during a write to the hard drive boot recrod (or whatever it is you call the memory address listing for files on an HD).

Is the cache a relic like modems that should be eliminated from our modern systems?
Click to expand...

Paranoia over disk fragmentation is the relic that should be eliminated.
 
I haven't seen any information that suggests fragmentation is a good thing. On the contrary, I have only seen that fragmentation is bad...some suggest it is not as big a deal with XP, but I have proven that wrong with my current laptop.

another take on this issues is that everyone sees the world moving towards the networked PC with networked Apps and storage, etc...bandwidth is cheap and plentiful, so....... the question is:

Why use local resources to store, even temporarily, stuff that is better kept at the server?

 
Originally posted by: Fike
I haven't seen any information that suggests fragmentation is a good thing. On the contrary, I have only seen that fragmentation is bad...some suggest it is not as big a deal with XP, but I have proven that wrong with my current laptop.
Click to expand...

There isn't a direct correlation between you having to recover from a corrupt kernel and the file system being fragmented.

There has to be something else wrong with your system that would cause a nasty crash; like a corrupt sector on your harddrive or improper shutdown. Or a bug in the kernel or one of your drivers that caused part of that file to be overwritten by garbage.

another take on this issues is that everyone sees the world moving towards the networked PC with networked Apps and storage, etc...bandwidth is cheap and plentiful, so....... the question is:

Why use local resources to store, even temporarily, stuff that is better kept at the server?
Click to expand...

Because it's still faster to have it local cache, especially for very big stuff. Imagine having a 5-6 meg image and having to download it again everytime you have to refresh. Also disk space is much cheaper for you then the websites that you visit's bandwidth.

Having a file cache on your harddrive isn't going to cause any fragmentation that matters unless you have very low amounts of disk space and/or are using a increadably crappy, obsolete, and error prone file system like Fat32.
 
Local cache is perfectly fine; the only important thing is to limit its size.

I.E. I've seen IE do some funny things with cache in the 1.5GB+ range; personally I usually set it to around 50MB (both IE and Mozilla) so it's quick on things I hit frequently and it doesnt cache too old stuff.
 
Originally posted by: Fike
another take on this issues is that everyone sees the world moving towards the networked PC with networked Apps and storage, etc...bandwidth is cheap and plentiful, so....... the question is:

Why use local resources to store, even temporarily, stuff that is better kept at the server?
Click to expand...
One of the fundamental techniques in improving perfomance of any computing system, distributed or not, is caching. So there's no way the concept as a whole is defunct, it's just usually transparent.
 
yes, but caching to a hard drive seems like an uneccessary task when the network is fast enough. Caching to RAM is fine because RAM doesn't have a finite number of cycles before failure like hard drives do.
 
Alright, if you're really that concerned with it. I'd rather use the hardware that I payed for.

If you don't have enough ram, the in-memory caching could lead to plenty of paging as well, which would even it out anyways.
 
Originally posted by: spyordie007
yes, but caching to a hard drive seems like an uneccessary task when the network is fast enough.
Click to expand...
The network still isnt going to be as fast as even a slow hard drive.
Click to expand...

But we're talking about the internet which is slower than the network

I keep my internet cache large and delete the whole IE cache folder on boot with a script
I wonder what effect a small cache has when downloading large files, although I mostly download large files using FTP and FileZilla.

As far as fragmentation goes the main thing to be concerned about are your registry hive files, they are constantly being written to therefore more likely to become fragmented and if they become damaged you will have a problem.
For the most part I don't worry about it, but when I ghost image my windows partition I restore the image at the same time to totally defrag it.

I also use Windows System Restore every once in a while to give the hive files a new creation date.
 
You can still have "memory caching" enabled. I guess you could construe that as page file fragmentation then, should Windows use its virtual memory, but blah, who cares?
 
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