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Managing the IE4 Cache

© Tracey Kirkpatrick-Pritchett

While you can elect to clear your cache and history using IE4's Internet Options dialog, the option doesn't entirely work:

• pointers to all your cookies are left in your Temporary Internet Files (cache) directory

• not all cache files are deleted (some are "lazy written" to disk, and others just mysteriously stay behind)

• the index.dat files in both the Temporary Internet Files and History directories aren't returned to their default sizes of 16K each, and in fact continue to grow into the megabyte range

And there is no option at all to clear (or otherwise manage) the cookies that web sites save to your disk (although you can elect to reject all cookies, or warn before accepting any cookie).

Furthermore, many of the popular programs that can help you handle these things don't work on NT!

In two weeks, I'll go over IE4 cookies, and at least one software program that can help an IE4 user deal with all IE4 clutter; and this week, we'll concentrate on the IE4 cache.

IE4 Cache size

I'll start with a [now] relatively easy topic: you can't set a numerical value for the cache size in IE4, but rather only a percentage (down to 1%) of your hard disk drive. With today's rather huge drives, this can mean very large caches.

Furthermore, cache files are deleted somewhat randomly instead of in order by oldest first (sort of killing the concept of a cache). Cf Brian Livingstone's Infoworld article, "Two utilities help improve Explorer's use of data cache".

I've recently found a Registry setting for IE4's cache size that works well enough for me (although it's totally undocumented as far as I can tell, so use it at your own risk).

HKEY_USERS \{UserID#} \Software \Microsoft \Windows \CurrentVersion \Internet Settings \Cache \Content

CacheLimit={hex value}

Note that when you double-click on the key to edit it, you'll get the DWORD editor with the current value in hex. Click the radio button by "decimal", then enter the size cache in bytes you'd like to use.

Turning off the Cache

Note also that you can essentially turn off the cache entirely by checking the "Delete saved pages when browser closed" box in the Security section of the Advanced tab of Internet Options. The following Registry setting does the same thing:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \SOFTWARE \Microsoft \Internet Explorer \Main

Enable_Disk_Cache=no

However, IE will continue to cache pages to the TIF directory (and History files to the History directory) during the current browsing session, to the greater of 4MB or 1% of your hard drive, and you'll still have pointers to Cookies and the growing index.dat files to reckon with.

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