Webpages and their components are usually cached both to memory (for fast reaccess in the current browser session) and hard-disk (for access in a future session). This ensures minimal bandwidth usage.

It also ensures maximal wasteage in terms of disk I/O and storage space, and high filesystem entropy as pages are deleted and overwritten.

Suggested is a cacheing system that only stores the pages and components that are visited often enough to warrant taking up diskspace in between browser sessions.

An added user-defined parameter Days controls the lag period, and the History use is expanded to included items' metadata.

Deletion of cache items is in the same manner as usual: the items are allowed to fill the cache until a user-defined maximum cache size is reached, andor an item is actively deleted if the Days (since last access) has been reached for it.

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For example:

A frequenter of the HB would hold the croissant icon, as well as the bun/bone .gifs in cache, the vain and stalkers would cache account pages;

A frequenter of a site with a massive static Flash homepage would hang onto the .html source and the Flash item;

A frequenter of an online newspaper would cache the banner, persistent advertising, and any photographs that are still there from the last visit.

(and yes, it means that a site/item has to be visited twice within the Days time-period before content is cached to disk at all)

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Ask your computer-geek if Frequent Flyer Cacheing is right for you.
-- FlyingToaster, Nov 26 2014

Personally, I prefer that the entire web site be copied from the hard disk to a RAM disk (not "flash" RAM, but DRAM). If the computer has an Uninterruptable Power Supply, the site will be safe enough. Caching will be irrelevant. At various intervals updates of data submitted to the site, by people using it, can be copied to the hard disk for long-term storage.
-- Vernon, Nov 26 2014


So you want to cache the entire Internet ? Anyways the idea is to not waste diskspace on stuff that you'll never want to see again, or stuff on pages that constantly change content. YMMV if this is a good scheme for you or not.

I was in the Firefox chatroom, having discovered a bit of a bug: when the hd-cache is set to 0MB in Options menu, hd-cacheing is still set to "on" in About:Config, which screws up web icons somewhat, since they're cached along with regular content. They're going to fix the next release so that it flips the flag off when somebody sets 0MB.

Anyways, somebody asked me why I went with no disk-cache. I answered truthfully: I keep a session open for 3-4 days at a time (using Sleep mode on the laptop) which means everything's cached in RAM anyways, and I prefer sites which lean towards text rather than graphics.

The odd thing which does have lots of graphics (like google Images webpage) are rarely accessed more than once.

This scheme would suit my usage rather nicely.
-- FlyingToaster, Nov 26 2014



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