How to move mozilla cache to another drive. Configuring the Google Chrome Cache Using Group Policy

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Firefox continues to gain popularity - every year it slowly but surely wins back from Internet Explorer territory in the browser market. However, nothing is perfect, and even Firefox has its flaws.

One of the most annoying is the slowdown of work over time. After Firefox installations just "flies", but, with active use, in 2-3 months it will look like a clumsy hippopotamus. Try, for example, after loading the computer and launching the browser, type in address bar some character and you will see Firefox freeze for a few moments. This is due to the fact that the browser must go through a huge list of visited sites and find the character you entered on them.

The Firefox history is stored in a database located on your hard drive in your profile directory. Over time, it grows to a huge size and fragments, and a slow hard drive also does not help speed up its work - all this leads to the fact that your favorite browser starts to slow down and freeze unpleasantly at the most inopportune moments.

You can optimize the database, memory consumption, or the log, but the effect will be short-lived and, over time, you will have to repeat these operations more and more often. In this article, we will look at a more radical way to increase performance: migrating profile data and Firefox cache to ramdisk ( virtual device created in random access memory computer). Firefox will run faster due to the fact that reading and writing data to memory is several times faster than the same operations on the hard drive.

To create a ramdisk, we will use the Dataram RAMDisk program - it is free and supports all Windows versions. So that you do not get confused, I will describe the whole process step by step:

Well, the virtual disk has been created - now it remains only to transfer your profile and cache to it and make Firefox work with the ramdisk.

Now you can use your favorite browser again. Saving and loading a profile is automated, you do not need to take any action. additional actions- just enjoy the "supersonic" Firefox.

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Active Internet users know that some sites periodically arrange pleasant surprises for their visitors - they give bonuses, gifts and discounts as part of various promotions. Do you want to receive bonuses to your account or be able to use the service for free?

When a user opens a website in a browser, data from remote server transferred to his computer, and part of this data is stored in a special local storage called cache. This approach allows you to load Internet pages faster when you visit the site again, but it also has its drawback.

If the storage of cached files is not periodically cleared, then pretty soon it will take up a decent amount of disk space. This is especially true, since the cache of all browsers is located in system partition, under which relatively little space is usually allocated.

Hence to free on disk C extra space, the browser cache should be moved somewhere else. For example, to another logical or physical drive. However, you may have other reasons for transferring the cache, it doesn’t matter, the main thing is to figure out how to do it right. This is exactly what we're going to do. Let's start with the most popular, as it is commonly believed, browser Google Chrome .

Transferring the Google Chrome Cache

If you have Chrome open, close it, and then copy and paste this path into the Explorer address bar:

%userprofile%/local settings/application data/google/chrome

In the directory that opens, you will see a folder. This is where the Chrome cache is stored.

Copy it to any place convenient for you. Now go to the desktop and open the properties of the Chrome shortcut. In the field at the end of the path already there, after a space, add the parameter --user-data-dir="D:/User Data" and save the result.

As you already understood, this is the new path to the transferred cache folder. Now you can launch the browser. From now on, it will access the cache from this folder.

Note: Please note that the new cache address will only be accessed when Chrome is launched via edited label.

Migrate Mozilla Firefox Cache

Moving the cache to Firefox is a bit more complicated. To get started, go to the profile directory, for which we enter the line in the address bar of Explorer %appdata%/Mozilla/Firefox/Profiles and press enter. In the profile park you will see a folder named xxxxxxx.default, where a line of icons is the profile's own name. You will have your own, only the extension will remain unchanged default.

We copy it to the right place, and then again go to Explorer, but at the address %appdata%/Mozilla/Firefox/profiles.ini . This will open in Notepad configuration file profiles.ini. Its bottom line contains the path to the default profile, which looks like this:

Path=Profiles/ xxxxxxx.default

We change it to a new path along which the directory with the cache was transferred:

Path=D:/xxxxxxx.default

At the same time, make sure that the parameter has a value 0 . If yours is different, fix it so it looks like the screenshot.

Launch your browser and open the page hidden settings by going to the address. Click on empty space right click mouse and select the option from the menu New -> String.

Give the new parameter a name browser.cache.disk.parent_directory, and as its value, paste the new path to the previously copied profile folder.

Restart Firefox and it will start working from the new folder.

Migrate the Opera Cache

Transferring the Opera cache is almost no different from what we did when transferring Google cache Chrome. Using the method described above, go to the directory at %userprofile%/AppData/Local/Opera Software/Opera Stable and copy the folder to the new location Cache.

We open the properties of the shortcut with which we are used to launching the browser and in the field to the line in it, after a space, add the parameter --disk-cache-dir=D:/Cache , Where D:/Cache- path to the copied or moved cache folder. Yes to old folder does not take up more space, you can delete it. The same goes for examples with other browsers.

About general note: V different versions browsers, the path to the cache directory may change . This needs to be monitored. If in your case the path to the cache is incorrect, then you will have to search for it manually.

Somehow, about a year ago, I got a computer that I could take with me to the sofa - that is, a laptop. The laptop was chosen purely for work, one of the requirements for choosing was good performance. Intel processor Core i3 seemed sufficient in terms of performance.

One day it got me, and it was decided to buy an SSD. And the fastest was selected. Having analyzed occupied place on drive C: and finances, it was decided to take a 64 GB SSD. And considering that with a small volume, most solid state drives speed falls proportionally with decreasing capacity, the range of selectable models quickly narrowed. The choice fell on the Samsung 830.

The problem with the drive itself is unknown. Sometimes the problem unfolds after a while. In other cases, the system reboots. However, this is usually done in order to move the specified directories to a different partition on a different drive in order to improve performance. If there is a warning to be careful, read it and accept it. These steps did the trick for me. Hope this helps someone too.

All browsers are designed to record browsing history, cache files and temporary files by default. And it will be a direct way to use to get back to where they left at last time when they close the browser window. Keep reading and you will find solutions. After quick scan, Deep Scan will automatically search for more files.

But how to insert an SSD into a laptop that does not have space for a second hard drive? I immediately dismissed the option of completely replacing the HDD with an SSD. A quick "google" led to the fact that there are still ways - instead of the now unnecessary DVD, put an SSD. I was not the first with such questions, and quickly found that I needed some kind of adapter into which the hard drive lays down and is inserted instead of the drive. I found the correct adapter on ebay.com. The lot was called "Universal 9.5mm 2.5" SATA 2nd HDD Hard Driver Caddy For CD DVD Optical Bay". It cost a little over eight dollars.

Transferring to another hard drive

You will be shown a warning that you must accept, and then you will see a long list of preferences sorted alphabetically. Three main types of preference variables are shown here: integer, boolean, and string variables. Before making any changes here, please read the information on the previous page and, importantly, read everything carefully. important notes before trying to configure "About: Configuration".

Editing the INI file

If set to 0, text queries are not case sensitive, if set to 1, they are case sensitive. The slide will close the window faster if it is inactive. The default value is every 12 hours. The number of backups created is controlled by this setting; a value of 0 disables automatic bookmark backup, and a value of -1 removes the limit on the number of bookmarks allowed. backups which is not recommended. The default value is 0, which means that compression is disabled.

After almost a month of waiting, a freshly purchased SSD was inserted into the adapter, and the adapter was already in the laptop. Of course, the adapter cover is not quite like that of the native drive, it turned out not quite imperceptibly, but tolerably enough.
Newfangled Windows 8 was installed on a brand new hard drive, everything flew and I was just fabulously glad that my laptop had almost gained a second life. My joy knew no bounds until I started monitoring the remaining life of the SSD. In particular, SSD program Ready predicted the rest of my SSD's life in six months. Somehow it was not at all happy. I started reading and wondering why.

A value between 1 and 9 enables compression, with a higher value the more data compression but potentially slower browsing. This setting determines maximum amount the space they can occupy in the offline cache. They are best allowed for faster site identification. If set to true, image placeholders will be displayed until the images on the page are fully loaded. Both options have a default value of 3, but you can increase or decrease it as you wish.

It turned out that everything was simple - the main load on the hard drive was ... Google Chrome! I would never have thought that the monster of a huge corporation would harm my hard drive so much.
Chrome constantly writes something to the cache. Almost continuously. Here every 2 seconds
c:\Users\User\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\Cache\
There is also a folder where the cache of the online video you are watching is written. This folder is called Media Cache.
And icons, history and all that are written. In the end, I came to the conclusion that the User Data folder is just constantly changing, writing-reading files and killing my SSD.

The default value is almost instantaneous, but it can be reduced to 0 to make it instantaneous, or raised to a higher value to delay its occurrence or effectively disable it. By default, this is a history of 3 recently closed windows, however you can change the value here to increase or decrease the number of windows kept. By default, the feature is enabled and automatically restores the last session after a crash. disable this feature by setting the value to 0 or you can set the number of crashes allowed before the auto session restore feature starts working.

A quick analysis of the Internet made it clear that this does not cause any inconvenience to Chrome engineers, because Chrome has practically no settings for this part. The settings can be forcefully applied by adding a parameter to the shortcut, and then Chrome must be launched through this shortcut, otherwise it will start without parameters. The same dances with a tambourine and firelis. But with the Opera, everything is simpler - I set it in the settings without a cache, and that's it.

For example, a value of 3 allows three crashes per line before the last session is automatically restored. A value of 0 only displays the close button on the active tab; 1 shows it on all open tabs; 2 causes no closed buttons to be displayed at all; and 3 displays a single close button at the end of the tab bar. If set to True, which is the default, your tab bar will appear where the title bar used to be. The default value is 140, and the lower the value, the more likely the close button will appear on the tab, but it may also copy some of the text in the tab title.

It was decided to disable that damned Chrome cache so that it wouldn't write anything to disk at all. Add the "--disk-cache-size=1 --media-cache-size=1" parameter to the Google Chrome launch shortcut. And about a miracle! The cache is not written, and the browser ... does not fly and works rather poorly. It is especially noticeable when you open chrome with 30 open tabs, when it reloads everything. Well, we didn’t get rid of the records at all either - something like icons and history was still written to disk.

The default value is 20 and it can be raised or lowered, but it will also be affected by the amount of visible space on your desktop. The default value is 12, but if you find this to be excessive, you can lower the value here. The next page provides alphabetical list useful information A: Configuration settings.

Adding an entry to add-ons

It is a popular music streaming service and is available as a free and premium service for most operating systems. The service uses a cache on the host system, which can fill up quite quickly, depending on how heavily the service is used.

The second solution to the problem was to transfer the folder with the User Data chrome profile settings to the HDD. This of course would solve all the problems, but the question is why did I buy an SSD?

My next option humble opinion, solved all my problems. I decided to use RAM drive- i.e. keep everything in RAM, and only write to the hard drive when you turn it off. Considering that my laptop is either on or in standby mode, it will be very rare to write when it is turned off. Of the programs I liked, I chose Qsoft RAMDisk. Installed as a driver. In the properties, I chose the size of the disk, the file system, where to write when shutting down. I allocated 512 MB for the disk (I think a reasonable minimum of 128 MB).

While this may not be an issue for most users, it may be for some as the service uses up to 10% free disk space primary hard drive for caching. Because of this, it can grow. If you have 20 GB free space, the cache can take up to 2 gigabytes if you have 200 GB of free space, it may take up to 20 gigabytes, etc.

Note. If you use this feature, you may not clear it completely. To change the cache size, run the following actions. You have two options when it comes to cache size. You can set it dynamically to 10% free disk space or choose fixed for it maximum size. To do this, go to the "use at most" option and use the slider to set a fixed maximum cache size. This size can be from 1 to 100 gigabytes.

It was possible to transfer just the cache folder, it was possible to add the Media Cache folder to it, but I decided to completely get rid of all kinds of entries, and transfer the entire User folder data.

It was again possible to specify in the shortcut parameters --user-data-dir="path to the ramdisk" to redirect the storage of the profile, it could be written in the registry, but when launched without a shortcut or updated, all this would not work. I began to think how to do it so that nothing changes to redirect. And then I remembered symbolic links!

The 1 gigabyte cache can store about 200 songs. If it runs out of space, the least played songs will be automatically removed and replaced with new tracks. You can use the same menu for this. This can be useful if your primary hard drive or partition is running out of space. Just move the cache to another drive and you're all set.

Note that the existing cache will be automatically moved to the new location so you don't lose access to any offline tracks. Deleting the cache to free up disk space is another thing you might want to consider, especially if you don't save songs for offline listening.

The Link Shell Extension utility was downloaded, with the help of which I actually created a “shortcut” in place of the User Data folder, a link that led to my ramdisk. Those. there was nothing on the disk, going into the User Data folder we were immediately redirected to the ramdisk. And what is the plus of such a solution - neither the system nor Chrome saw any catch.

Chrome began to work even faster than it was on the SSD. Very fast. Now I’ll probably even recommend everyone to at least move the chrome cache to a small ramdisk. For me personally, it is a mystery why engineers do not pay attention to the problem that chrome writes a lot and often. Reliability of information is good, but not at the cost of killing a hard drive!

Other ways to move your profile

You can find the location in the caching settings. Just delete all files and folders inside the vault.

The Browse Folder dialog box opens.
Select the folder containing the folder you copied.

Regardless of the methods used, you will need to find the folder containing your profile.

Create a new profile and copy over it

Create a new profile and transfer old data

Create new profile in the right place.
This will create a default profile.

This method is only recommended for advanced users as it can be tricky to troubleshoot. They usually do not ignore bad entries, regardless of their position in the file. They explain that these devices based on flash memory technology are much faster but also have a certain number of read cycles. Once these cycles have been overcome, speed, performance and reliability decrease with read and write errors.

As a result of the manipulations done, chrome flies for me, and writes all its nasty things to the RAM. The SSD is happy and enjoys a long remaining life.

To speed up the loading of pages, the Google Chrome browser caches their content: pictures, js scripts, css styles. All this accumulates on the hard drive and grows in size up to hundreds of megabytes, if not more. Therefore, we have already considered You can't completely disable caching in Chrome, Google suggests using incognito mode instead.

You can use this page to send files to anyone. When the other person clicks on the link, the transfer will begin. Save the browser page until the file is transferred. The new functionality makes it even easier. Once a user is in your contact list, you can send them a notification by clicking on their name.

Other uses for this scheme

On this disk create a folder Cache and click on it with the right mouse button. In the opened context menu choose Remember link source.

Then we go to the directory:
c:\Users\YOUR_USERNAME\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\

Since the AppData folder is usually hidden, you can open Start - Run and paste the following path for a quick jump:
%userprofile%\local settings\application data\google\chrome\user data\default\

Here, with the browser closed, delete the folder Cache, then right-click to-do and select Place As - Symbolic Link, thereby inserting a label. Thus, Chrome will access the Cache folder in its usual way and not suspect that it is actually in RAM. At the same time, it is still necessary to periodically produce, preventing its volume from increasing beyond the size virtual disk in RAM.

If desired, you can do the same not only for the cache folder, but for the entire folder User Data, which includes Cache. Thus, you can move all your user data that Chrome works with into RAM: history, cookies, extension data, etc.

knight with a gun March 16, 2013 at 02:06

We disaccustom Google Chrome to kill a resource HDD SSD

background

Somehow, about a year ago, I got a computer that I could take with me to the sofa - that is, a laptop. The laptop was chosen purely for work, one of the requirements for choosing was good performance. CPU Intel Core i3 seemed sufficient in terms of performance.

But, at first, a smart laptop more and more began to annoy me with its slowness. It's not that he was stupid, hung up and the like - no, he just worked slowly evenly. This was especially noticeable if you work on a “full-sized” computer with a fast hard drive, and then you switch to a laptop. This was due to the laptop's slow hard drive. Moreover, this is not a problem specifically for my laptop, this is a problem for all laptops, because they have slow hard drives with a rotation speed of 5400 rpm.

One day it got me, and it was decided to buy an SSD. And the fastest was selected. After analyzing the occupied space on the C: drive and finances, it was decided to take a 64 GB SSD. And considering that with a small volume for most SSDs, the speed drops proportionally with a decrease in capacity, the range of selectable models quickly narrowed. The choice fell on the Samsung 830.

After almost a month of waiting, a freshly purchased SSD was inserted into the adapter, and the adapter was already in the laptop. Of course, the adapter cover is not quite like that of the native drive, it turned out not quite imperceptibly, but tolerably enough.
Newfangled Windows 8 was installed on a brand new hard drive, everything flew and I was just fabulously glad that my laptop had almost gained a second life. My joy knew no bounds until I started monitoring the remaining life of the SSD. In particular, the SSD Ready program predicted the rest of my SSD's life in six months. Somehow it was not at all happy. I started reading and wondering why.

It was decided to disable that damned Chrome cache so that it wouldn't write anything to disk at all. Adding to the Google Launcher Shortcut Chrome setting"--disk-cache-size=1 --media-cache-size=1". And about a miracle! The cache is not written, and the browser ... does not fly and works rather poorly. It is especially noticeable when you open chrome with 30 open tabs, when it reloads everything. Well, we didn’t get rid of the records at all either - something like icons and history was still written to disk.

The next option, in my humble opinion, solved all my problems. I decided to use RAM Drive - i.e. keep everything in RAM, and only write to the hard drive when you turn it off. Considering that my laptop is either on or in standby mode, it will be very rare to write when it is turned off. Of the programs I liked, I chose Qsoft RAMDisk. Installed as a driver. In the properties, select the size of the disk, file system, where to write when turned off. I allocated 512 MB for the disk (I think a reasonable minimum of 128 MB).

It was possible to transfer just the cache folder, it was also possible to add the Media Cache folder to it, but I decided to completely get rid of all kinds of entries and transfer the entire User Data folder.

As a result of the manipulations done, chrome flies for me, and writes all its nasty things to the RAM. The SSD is happy and enjoys a long remaining life.

To speed up the work of any browser, I advise you to use a RAM disk.

RAM disk is virtual image hard drive created in the computer's RAM.

Let me briefly summarize the idea:

In the computer's random access memory (RAM disk). Then we delete the browser and install it in a new way, but already on the created RAM disk. We transfer the cache folder (temporary Internet files) of the browser to the RAM disk.

This method is very efficient and allows you to significantly speed up the browser.

It must be borne in mind that how many megabytes you allocate for a RAM disk will reduce the computer's RAM so much. Therefore, the use of a RAM disk is possible only if there is sufficient RAM. If your computer has less than 4GB of RAM, then this method of acceleration is ineffective.

There are two transfer options

The most optimal is a complete transfer, this is when an accelerated browser is installed on the RAM disk and the browser cache folder is fixed there. But this option requires a RAM disk of at least 300 MB. If your computer does not have enough RAM to use the first option, you can use the second option. Pin only the cache folder to the RAM disk.

You can choose the size of the RAM disk arbitrarily, depending on how much you can afford to “bite off” a megabyte from the RAM. But in any case, the larger the cache folder, the better.

Below I give instructions for transferring such browsers to a RAM disk:

Transferring the Mozilla Browser to a RAM Disk

1. If you do not have the Mozilla browser installation file or it outdated version download it from the official site

2. Remove installed browser Mozilla from a computer.

3. We restart the computer.

4. Launch setup file Mozilla browser.

6. We restart the computer.

7. Launch Mozilla browser.

8. In the address bar of the browser, type the command: about:config and press the Enter key ( Enter). A page appears with a warning like “Don’t go where you don’t know”, ignore this warning and move on.

9. Now in the browser window we see a bunch of various settings. We need to add one more to all these records. To do this, right-click anywhere on the page and in the menu that appears, select the “New” item, then “String”, a window will appear with the “Enter the setting name” field, where we enter: browser.cache.disk.parent_directory then click "OK" and in the window that appears, enter the path to store the cache folder. For example, a RAM disk has the name "Z", respectively, we write Z:\\ and click "OK".

10. Reboot the computer. The cache folder will be created automatically during the reboot.

Transferring the Opera browser to a RAM disk

1. If you do not have the installation file of the Opera browser or it is an outdated version, download it from the official website

2. Remove the installed Opera browser from a computer.

3. We restart the computer.

4. Run the installation file of the Opera browser.

5. During the installation process, as the installation location, specify the address of the folder located on the RAM disk created for this purpose (the folder must be created beforehand).

6. We restart the computer.

7. Launch browser Opera.

8. Open the Opera and enter the address " about:config"(without quotes).

9. In the page that opens, find the "User Prefs" section and click on it to open it.

10. We find the parameter "Cache Directory4" and enter the value (without quotes!) " X:Opera"in this value, instead of "X", you must put the letter under which your RAM disk was created. For example, the RAM disk has the name "Z", respectively, we write (Without quotes) " Z:Opera»Go down the page and click the "Save" button.

11. We restart the computer.

Transferring the Google Chrome browser to a RAM disk

Unfortunately, during Google installations Chrome from the official site during the installation process, the browser is automatically installed on the "C" drive. The option to change the installation location is not yet available. Therefore, we restrict ourselves to transferring the cache folder to a RAM disk.

1. On a previously created RAM disk, create a folder and name it User Data

2. On the desktop we find a shortcut Google browser Chrome and right click on it.

3. In the drop-down menu that appears, find the line "Properties" and click on it with the left mouse button.

4. In the "Properties: Google Chrome" window that opens, open the "Shortcut" tab.

5. In the line "Object:" there is an entry like C:\Users\1\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe

This entry may differ slightly from the approximate one, but it does not matter. The main thing to add to this entry is the key

Disk-cache-dir="X:\Chrome Cache"

In the text of this key, you need to replace the letter X with the letter of your RAM disk.

For example, the letter of your RAM disk is "Z", respectively, the key should look like this

Disk-cache-dir="Z:\Chrome Cache"

Attention! There must be a space between the entry and the key.

Therefore, after a space, add another key: --disk-cache-size=

Where after the sign of the equation it is necessary to write desired volume cache folders in bytes.

For example, after creating a 500 MB ramdisk, its free space (it is necessary to take into account the free, not the total disk space) is 483 MB. In this case, 482 MB can be allocated for the cache. Please note: it is 482, not 483! That is, you must always allocate 1 MB less than the declared free space, otherwise there will be glitches.

As a result, our key will look like: --disk-cache-size=505600000

In general, the entire record looks something like this: C:\Users\1\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe --disk-cache-dir="Z:\Chrome Cache" --disk-cache-size=505600000

6. Insert it into the Chrome shortcut, press the "Apply" and "OK" buttons.

7. We restart the computer.