Disable disk caching in Chromium

Google’s Chromium browser doesn’t offer a menu option to disable disk caching. Users concerned with reducing wear on SSD drives and those with super-fast internet connections may wish to use this facility.
By running chromium with the command line option:

–disk-cache-dir=/dev/null

We can effectively disable the chromium cache.

To make the change permanent, edit the Ubuntu launcher for chromium as follows, and then drag to your dock as required.

Since chromium-browser --help doesn’t give us a full list of switches, we can inspect the source code here and find other command line options.

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6 Responses to Disable disk caching in Chromium

  1. Jason says:

    The most recent Chromium will create that “null” directory and continue disk caching so to stop it completely you must now provide a nonexistent drive letter like this…

    –disk-cache-dir=G:/abc

    Finally, you can double check that disk cacheing has been disabled by running…

    chrome://view-http-cache/

    …and you should see a blank page with a “no disk cache” at the very top.

    Works like a charm in my custom browser.

  2. roitne durp says:

    The command given in the above Ubuntu launcher is in error because the variable %U representing the URL must be at the end of the string, for example in my Debian 9 (stretch) is:
    /usr/bin/chrom–disk-cache-dir=/dev/nullium –enable-remote-extensions –disk-cache-dir=/dev/null %U
    Do not copy the command given in the head of this page because when it is pasted produces the following effect: –disk-cache-dir=/dev/null
    here the –disk-cache is in error because is prefixed by 1 long minus sign instead of 2 short.

  3. jairo says:

    Coloque en –disk-cache-dir=/tmp ya que el directorio /tmp es directorio temporal

    tmpfs on /tmp type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,nodev,noatime,size=1009096k)

  4. You can also do –disk-cache-size=1, limiting the disk cache to 1 byte. This effectively disables the disk cache.

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