How to Change Google Chrome Cache Location And Size

Google Chrome is one of the popular browsers used by web users but it is still not the faultless one. You might be aware of the fact that there is no technique to change Google Chrome’s cache size and location from the browser preferences. However, here is an easy way to achieve this by making a few tweaks to chrome’s installation path settings.

For Windows 7, Google Chrome’s cache is located in the following folder:

C:\Users\%username%\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\Cache

If your computer’s hard drive space is fairly low or you have by mistake created a low volume system partition then you might be facing hard times disposing Google Chrome’s web cache. You can even disable disk cache if you want the browsing data to be stored on your ram and disposed off as soon as you exit  Google Chrome.

Here are the steps that needs to be done:

1. Right click the Google Chrome shortcut icon from desktop. If there is no shortcut already, create one.

2. Switch to the “properties” tab

3. Here, you will find a “Target” Field. You have to replace the Target text with

C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe — disk-cache-dir=”mylocation” –disk-cache-size=cachesize

where mylocation stands for the path of the directory where you want to store the cache, and cachesize stands for the size of the cache you want to keep on your disk (in bytes). Following is an example:

As an example, if you want to store cache on D:\Cache and you want the cache size to be 100MB, you can replace the Target text as:

C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe –disk-cache-dir=”d:\cache” –disk-cache-size=104857600

3. If you want a negligible amount of cache to be stored on your hard disk and remaining to be consumed on ram itself, you can put the cache size to be ‘1’ which will consume all of the browsing data on ram only.

4. Now, press the Apply button and then the OK button to save your settings.

Note: The above settings will only work if you run Google Chrome by clicking the shortcut from your desktop. If a third party application launches Google Chrome or you open it from the installation directory, the older cache settings will work

In such situations. you may apply the following settings in Windows registry to permanenetly change Google Chrome’s cache location and size:

1. Open the registry editor by typing in regedit in the run dialog box.
2. Now locate the registry key HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\ChromeHTML\shell\open\command
3. Now, edit this key just like you edited the Target Field in Google Chrome’s shortcut.
4. However, you have to edit the key just the way like you did with Target Field, you will have to place – “%1″ at the end.

That was all you have to do to change your cache size and location. Chrome developers are getting a lot of suggestions from their users to give them this option in GUI too, you can also drop in your suggestion to Google Chrome developers here.