A normal advice from a technical person on speeding up PC
would be to clear cache as well as run the ccleaner. Clearing of cache! Does it
really work?
People assume that all temporary files are a clutter created
by miserable applications. Cache files are created by the apps in order to
store commonly used details so that it does not have to be generated or even downloaded
again.
If the browser does not have full CSS immediately then it
cannot start interpreting the page, leading to delays. This is how the second
time you visit a page on same site and it displays layout of page quickly. This
has been cached.
When an application has to generate a set of info then it
might take some time to regenerate every time app starts up. Instead of doing
initialization every time, it would do once and would cache in a file.
After wiping the cache you actually need to start work all
over again and in the process slow down the computer.
If the system does not have much of space in the drive then
the applications would have created several temporary files. You might also have a reason to clear out
cache or even reconfigure the apps in order to use less temporary space.
A solid state drive in the computer would relieve your of
performance worries.
Cache also becomes corrupted as well as requires a wipe to
get things going on. It may be so that cache has become outdated and has old
files.
Cache is also wiped if the algorithm is not good. Say for
example the application’s search box attempts would give a dropdown of the
recent items and algorithm is slow. There would be better performance while
searching to disable history or even wipe cache. This leads to people believing
that cache is bad. In reality cache is good.
However if you are worried about privacy, then cache
deletion becomes necessity. If you delete cache then it would only delete those
files unless the space is overwritten. Nothing is being deleted permanently. You need to just few utilities and the deleted
files would be recovered.
You can check it for yourself. Just set your browser to open
a set of favorite web pages at once and record time it takes to open. You can
wipe cache as well as load same page again.
There is no harm in wiping the cache. Your apps would
rebuild it immediately. But you must have realized that clearing cache actually
does not help.
