Each Internet browser has a special repository of the main elements of the web pages visited by the user. This is the so-called cache, and it is created to speed up access to frequently used resources. Due to the fact that the browser does not need to load new information from the site each time, but only to extract a local copy from the internal storage, the web page can load much faster.
However, the amount of storage in browsers, including the Opera browser, is limited, and with active Internet surfing it will be quite full quite quickly, thereby reducing its efficiency. Therefore, for the convenience of users, the developers have provided the ability to change the size of the storage, which can be both reduced and increased. In Opera, the cache, as a rule, is regulated without much difficulty, you should only pay attention to several features of this process.
Increase storage in older browser versions
In versions of Opera released before February 2013, the procedure for resizing the cache is performed using the browser settings menu. You can get there using the keyboard shortcut CTRL and F12, as well as a sequential transition from the main menu to the settings menu and the tab "General settings". Then in the "Advanced" item you need to open the "History", where you can adjust the storage volume, choosing from several ready-made options.
This section allows you to both increase the cache in "Opera" and adjust the limit settings for pages remembered by the browser - through the line "Remember addresses" and a drop-down list. In addition, it is possible to completely disable caching services (remove the label from the "Remember the contents of the visited pages" line), or activate an add-in that automatically clears the storage after closing the browser.
If the question arises, how to increase the cache in Opera, but the OS is installed on a small hard drive, then all these manipulations most often negatively affect the system. By expanding the storage, the user loses precious megabytes, and on the other hand, creating a small cache for the purpose of this is the most free place to save all the benefits of caching quickly nullify. The browser simply has nowhere to store data. It remains either to reconcile, or transfer the storage to another disk.
How to increase browser cache "Opera" based on WebKit
In older versions of Opera, increasing the cache turned out to be a fairly simple procedure. But since 2013, when Opera Software completely abandoned the old engine in favor of WebKit, the function of adjusting the cache volume on the disk from browsers was completely removed, and even calling hidden settings from the address bar does not give a result. But the opportunity remained: to increase the cache in the new "Opera" is possible using console commands that are entered in the properties of the shortcut in one of the fields.
The procedure is as follows:
- Using the context menu, call the properties of the browser shortcut.
- In the "Shortcut" tab, move the cursor to the "Object" line, click on the field, then backspace and print two commands through the space:
-disk-cache-dir = "path to the repository directory" -disk-cache-size = 1073741824.
- Here, as an example, the disk cache size is 1 GB. But you need to specify this volume in bytes, otherwise the program simply will not understand what is required of it. To calculate the required value, you can use any online converter.
- Check that the changes are made correctly, and click "OK."
- Restart the browser if it was open.
Disabling Opera Cache
Often there are situations in which page caching needs to be completely disabled. Most often this is due to traffic restrictions when using mobile modems or other limited connection. In older versions, you can perform this operation, as well as increase the cache in Opera, or clear it, in the same menu. For WebKit-based browsers, where such settings are not accessible to users at all, everything is done through the properties of the shortcut using the same command, only the amount of space used should be limited as much as possible by setting 1 kilobyte. If you just need to clean, you can do this by opening the browser history.
Work with SSD
Cases of excessive write browser data to disk are known to many users. And many myths about the relatively short lifetime of SSDs still excite more than one mind. That is why a significant part of users who have become happy owners of an SSD drive try, having read horror stories on the Internet, to secure the new device as much as possible, optimizing everything that is possible.
Modern SSDs are faster than hard drives, but they are not inferior to them in reliability, which is confirmed by more than a dozen tests. Therefore, all operations to transfer the browser cache from ssd to the hard drive at the moment do not lead to anything other than losing the speed of the browser’s interaction with the operating system and the user.