Speed Up Firefox by Moving Your Cache to RAM, No RAM Disk Required

We've talked about moving your cache files to a RAM disk to speed things up, but it turns out Firefox has this feature built in. Here's how to turn it on.

Since your computer can access data in RAM faster than on a hard drive, moving cached data to RAM can improve your page load times. In Firefox, all you need to do to move your caches to RAM is open up about:config and make a few tweaks.

Once you get into about:config, type browser.cache into the filter bar at the top. Find browser.cache.disk.enable and set it to false by double clicking on it. You'll then want to set browser.cache.memory.enable to true (mine seemed to already be set as such), and create a new preference by right clicking anywhere, hitting New, and choosing Integer. Call the preference browser.cache.memory.capacity and hit OK. In the next window, type in the number of kilobytes you want to assign to the cache (for example, typing 100000 would create a cache of 100,000 kilobytes or 100 megabytes). A value of -1 will tell Firefox to dynamically determine the cache size depending on how much RAM you have.

This tip isn't brand new, but it is something we didn't know about, so if you're looking to eke a bit more speed out of Firefox (and who isn't?) this should give your page loading speeds a little boost. You can check up on your memory cache activity by typing about:cache in the address bar. Hit the link for more information on this tweak, and if you try it out, let us know how it works for you in the comments.

Update: One of the folks over at Mozilla laid out a few downsides to using this method. It's not a bad idea, per se, but it's good to be informed about what this does vs. the default settings (and how future plans for Firefox will work with this tweak). Thanks, Boris!