Larger Cache Size to Increase Performance of the Partitioned Cached Feature, says Google Chrome Team

Google is trying to experiment with increasing the storage size for the browser cache after introducing the partitioned cached feature a while back.

Browser Cache is basically storage units in which the browser stores the searched site into the hardware so that in case you search for that site again, it can just pick it from the local drive instead of searching the web.

Previously Google used a single shared cache for all the resources, but this later came into knowledge that it can be the reason for different malicious activities as it opens access to a lot of different side channels. When this came into consideration, Google added a new feature to Chrome 86 that partitions the cache so that each site has access to its own cache and does not read other sites.

After introducing this feature, Google noticed a small performance hit, but it is so small that the security benefits outweigh it and experts at Google are sure that it will be stable once they progress to the beta version. The performance hit was caused due the resources that were previously shared among all sites was now being downloaded from every site. To prevent this, Google is experimenting to increase the storage size for browser cache.

The question is, what increasing the size of cache will do?

You see, once browser cache was partitioned for their own respective sites the eviction rate lowered. It means the amount of time the browser cache stores the information about the website, reduced and would be deleted faster than it used to previously. To overcome this barrier and improve the performance of the feature, Google is trying to increase the cache size in order to see if it affects the rate of eviction, which makes sense to do after the partitioning of the browser cache. In this experiment on the cache sizes Google will use different sizes of 2x, 2.5x, 3x and normal cache sizes to see whether the increasing in the size of cache effects the performance positively.

It is currently not to our knowledge if whether the experiments are taking place at Google Chrome Canary Buildings or the internal buildings but what we for sure know is that if the experiment in increasing the cache size is successful, Google hopes that the amount of times the cache is deleted from the browser is reduced and it will also improve the performance of the web browsing.



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