If you never use internet explorer, then you probably won’t be interested in this article.

I recently noticed that my internet explorer was getting sluggish.

I did a defrag, and that helped a bit, but not much.

I started looking at the folder “temporary internet files” (c:documents and settings{username}Local SettingsTemporary Internet Files)

Hey, there’s just over 4,000 files in this folder! (Internet options -> General ->Browsing History Settings -> view files)

I had set this folder to use only 22Mb of disk space. Of course when most of the files are less than 1Kb, theoretically, I could end up with over 20,000 files in one folder.

Since I know that accessing any NTFS folder with more than 1,000 files can make your computer seem seriously slow… I decided that this needed fixing (preferably in a non-microsoft way).

The answer is CacheSentry.

Although its an old program, there doesn’t seem to be anything that works better.

Once installed, you encounter its one minor flaw: you cannot tell it to autostart when windows starts… you need to manually put a shortcut to it into the startup folder.

But once started, I set the max cache size to 15Mb, and the number of days before erasing unused cookies to 180 days (6 months).

It has an option to fix a bug in the IE cache size (although I don’t know if this bug is still present in ie7 and ie8 ).

But it does do a great job at deleting “stray” files (ie files that should be deleted, but internet explorer “forgets” that they exist).

After running cache sentry, I now have about 700 files in the temporary internet files folder.

And after another defragment, Internet explorer feels nice and quick.

So now, I have CacheSentry running on all my main systems.