Chrome killing SSDs? Ramdisks and other goodies.

I recently came across documentation on how chrome is pretty disk I/O intensive, and read up on how it can 'possibly' effect the life of an SSD drive. I have never worried too much about that, but after reading how much chrome does, I got to thinking maybe I should cut out excessive I/O where I can.

Many of you might have seen that chrome offers no UI that can change the cache settings. There are some flags to do this though
--disk-cache-dir="path to cache directory" --disk-cache-size=size of cache in bytes

Anyway, after looking into this I found what some are doing is either redirecting the cache to a normal hdd or to a ram disk. Some are just setting the cache size to 1 which essentially creates a 1mb cache. You can also redirect the cache directory to '/dev/null' which then creates no cache that I can find. I have tried all 3 methods, but haven't decided yet which if any I will pursue beyond testing.

What are your thoughts?

Sul.

 

How are these flags set? Where are they?

 

you can do a search for command line parameters of chrome, and there are a number of sites that list them as well as straight from the chromium projects. But all you need to do is add those to the shortcut.

Sul.

 

I've been using those command switches for quite some time.

 

http://peter.sh/experiments/chromium-command-line-switches/

 

An SLC SSD won't be affected as much as a MLC.

 

Chrome uses extensive caching. Sounds like a good idea. (Unless you take another good idea and avoid SSD completely.)

 

Thanks Sully for the pointer. BTW, a web search brought me to this site which suggests also that

Any thoughts on that?