Can tracking cookies slow down your pc?

Charlton_King

I've always read that tracking cookies aren't malicious software as such... but I'm wondering if they can slow down a pc if they accumulate in large enough numbers and they aren't regularly eliminated.

Any ideas?

fwor

They will almost certainly slow down your browser, but nothing else, as no program other than the browser should be looking at them.

Having said that, I doubt that the effect will be large, as it shouldn't be a huge amount of data to search through, and they should be indexed (by the domain name of the site that set them) to make searching easy.

esuhl

fwor wrote: »

They will almost certainly slow down your browser, but nothing else, as no program other than the browser should be looking at them.

Really? I don't know for sure but I wouldn't have thought there would be any perceptible difference in speed if you have a lot of cookies. Cookies are just like tiny files. The OS only loads files when it needs them - having a lot of files on a drive won't slow down your computer; so I would imagine that having lots of cookies wouldn't slow down your browser... Probably...

fwor

I only say that on the basis that every time the browser has to find a cookie to read or update it, it has a bigger list to search through to find it, which (I confess I assume) will take more time.

I'm not saying that the extra time will be large - in fact I suspect that it will be an imperceptibly small fraction of a second each time, but I don't have the controlled conditions needed to actually measure it... so yes, I'm just guessing...

esuhl

Session cookies may be useful for some websites to function, but every browser on every PC I use deletes all cookies when I close it... I also have the TACO Firefox add-on to block many tracking cookies...