Cache in OW 2.0?

[William Shipley]

There's isn't going to be a disk cache in 2.0.  We'll solve the issue of  
saving stuff to the file system some other way.

Disk cache for most types of accesses is slower and unnecessary on a  
virtual memory system.  The only advantages I can think of for a disk  
cache is it could let two people share the same cache or it could be  
persistent between sessions, but 1.0 did neither of these and it's too  
late to add them to 2.0.  Most of OmniWeb's paying customers are using it  
to access information in-house, on fast local area networks.  Thus they  
are more concerned about memory/disk footprint and less concerned about  
having to reload documents.  Their number one complaint of 1.0 was that  
it sucked down memory too fast, so we eliminated storing documents on  
disk as well as in memory, and made the memory cache expire.

If you want disk caching I recommend getting a proxy server with caching  
(like CERN's).  This will allow you to share your cache with everyone on  
your site and thus save disk space and time.

In the future OmniWeb might support a shared, persistent cache, but this  
will depend on whether customers ask for this.  We may also write a  
server which does all the caching for OmniWeb clients at a site using DO,  
but nothing is definite.

-Wil