Why you should not clear your cache.

Time and time again I read somewhere online that you should clear your cache when playing Farmville because it will cause errors. This is very far from the truth of the matter. First let me explain what the cache is, what it does, and why you want to keep it around.


Cache is a term used for stuff that is stored locally on your computer, in regards to Farmville the best way to describe it is the art work. Each tree, crop, animal, decoration is a separate file both on Zynga's servers and on your machine. The cache on your machine is keeping a copy of those items, meaning if you already have a copy of the item there is no need to download it again. Firefox can just look at its cache and pull the data from there. This will save you time, first you will not need to wait while your machine downloads the file again, but when loading up the Market for example you will not have to wait while it downloads hundreds of files at once.

The reason you see people talking about clearing the cache is because if something starts going wrong on your farm, it could be the old version already on your machine. After all if Zynga updates Farmville and changes the way a grey kitten looks, the file in your cache will load instead of the new one from the server. Once enough things change then you will start running into an issue.

So in a nutshell, the cache makes things faster by not having you download over and over. Should you clear it on exit? no. Should you clear it when you run into a problem? YES!

You can also change the size of the cache, a larger size will let you keep more items downloaded on your machine, but will take up more space. For new computers space is generally not an issue so I say make it unlimited!

What about de-fragging your hard drive? You should do this once a week regardless of problems. De-fragging the hard drive will help keep load times down, and everything running happily.