Hi,

I'm using KDE as my default desktop environment since KDE 4.2 now and there is a thing that realy annoy me. At every start of the KDE desktop and several times a day a process called kio_http_cache_ starts and make a lot of disk access for a few minutes.
That doesn't look like a real problem but if I'm reading a full HD stream using VDPAU for example and if kio_http_cache_ starts the video will start to lag in a horrible way...
If kio_http_cache_ is running the whole system is realy less responsive, app starts way slower, the system tends to freeze for a few seconds...

So is there a way to disable this? And why is it there anyway? Why should I need http cache handled by kde? Isn't it the job of my browser?

There are two ways. The recommended way is to add a nice value to the cleaner. As far as I can see, the cleaner job runs at the same priority as other processes. To proceed, locate the file http_cache_cleaner.desktop on your system and open it. Find the line starting with Exec and replace it with:

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Exec=nice kio_http_cache_cleaner

If your HD videos are still lagging during the cache cleanup, you could try to remove the execution bits from the kio_http_cache_cleaner command:

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chmod 644 `which kio_http_cache_cleaner`

But do this on your own risk, this is not the recommended way of doing things.

The HTTP cache is KDE wide because more applications than Konqueror use the HTTP protocol. So it's better to have a centralized cache instead of one HTTP cache for each application. To make sure there's no old cruft left in the cache, it runs a cleanup every once in a while (in the source code I read it's at least every 30 minutes).

One additional note, see also bug http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=130862

There you can see that this is (partly) taken care of from the KDE side. This will be in the soon-to-be-released KDE 4.4.

Cool thx for you answer!
Another reason for me to be excited about 4.4!
Can't wait