How To Change Google Chrome's Cache Location And Size - gHacks Tech News

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How To Change Google Chrome’s Cache Location And Size

by Martin Brinkmann on October 19, 2010 in Google Chrome - Last Update: July 25, 2013 47

Did you know that there is no setting in the graphical user interface of the Google Chrome browser to change the location and size of the cache? I searched up and down and could not find an option to do that. Some users may say that this is not essential anymore, with growing hard drives and such. Others may have a different opinion on it on the other hand, considering that Chrome always installs itself on the main system partition in Windows.

The cache is conveniently placed in the installation directory as well. You find the default Chrome cache location under C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\Cache if you are running Windows 7.

There are several reasons why someone would want to change the location and size of the Chrome cache. Solid State Drives and system partitions with low storage space come to mind. And some users may want to move the cache location to the RAM instead, to speed up things, get the cache auto deleted on exit or avoid to many write cycles on the system partition.

Changing Chrome's Cache size and location

The only official option to relocate the cache and change its size are two command line switches that need to be added to the Chrome shortcut. That's not the most elegant solution, considering that these shortcuts are not executed if Chrome is the default browser and a web address is launched from a third party software.

• --disk-cache-dir
• --disk-cache-size

The disk cache dir parameter defines a new location of the Chrome cache, while disk cache size changes the cache limit. Here is an example:

--disk-cache-dir="d:\cache" --disk-cache-size=104857600

This changes the location of the Google Chrome cache to d:\cache, and the limit of the cache to 100 Megabytes.