Monday, April 21, 2008

Not caching

If I accidentally leave a video page on video.google or youtube and immediately come back, the video file is not cached: it has to be loaded all over again. How wasteful and stupid is that? And this is true of all my browsers.
It's especially stupid on video.google, since links on that site will not open in new windows/tabs if I command-click them, the open in the same window, which means that the loaded video file is lost.
You'd think the video server sites would be interested in minimizing their bandwidth load?

3 comments:

Bert said...

There is little that the sites can do about this, since caching at their end of the pipe doesn't help. At your end, it is the software that is "faulty". It does cache all the small bits & pieces (regardless of where they are to be displayed), but large files are often disregarded by caching algorithms when space is restricted.

The limit on the size of cached objects might be hard-coded, but not necessarily. Are you sure that you don't prevent caching by limiting too severely the amount of disk space your browser can use?

Eolake Stobblehouse said...

I remember in the old days you could set the amount of space the cache could use, but not I can't find such a setting, neither in Safari nor in Firefox.

Anonymous said...

It has nothing to do with browser settings. Those flash video players that websites use are to "blame". They can't access your hard drive (which is a good thing!) and so they can't cache things. The video will live in your memory until it's unloaded, and that's the end of that.