Re: 'But firefox is no longer just a browser' (Firefox fat on Javascript?)

On Fri, May 27, 2011 at 14:27, Robert Kaiser <[email protected]> wrote:
> Michael Witten schrieb:
>>
>> Are such resources being cached in working memory? Maybe most
>> resources should be cached explicitly on disk
>
> Well, there's always a memory vs. speed tradeoff here. Of course, we could
> optimize for using as little memory as in any way possible, which just would
> mean a very significant cost in speed, depending on how far we go. I tend to
> think of this in terms of "buying memory is cheap, buying time isn't".

You are indeed correct that it is slower to read data from disk rather
than working memory; I am reminded of this fact everytime Firefox
shoves my other programs' working memory to disk.

So, I say this tradeoff should be exposed to the choice of the
individual user: I would rather have a slower Firefox cache than a
slower overall computing system (and a memory upgrade is not
possible).

Having Firefox read from my local disk is likely much faster and
bandwidth conserving than having it read from a remote server on the
Internet, so the cache is still quite useful even if it has been put
on disk.