When Polipo runs out of memory (see Limiting memory usage), it will start discarding instances from its memory cache. If a disk cache has been configured, it will write out any instance that it discards. Any memory allocation that prompted the purge must then wait for the write to complete.
In order to avoid the latency hit that this causes, Polipo will
preemptively write out instances to the disk cache whenever it is
idle. The integer idleTime
specifies the time during which
Polipo will remain idle before it starts writing out random objects to
the on-disk cache; this value defaults to 30s. You may want to
decrease this value for a busy cache with little memory, or increase
it if your cache is often idle and has a lot of memory.
The value maxObjectsWhenIdle
(default 32) specifies the
maximum number of instances that an idle Polipo will write out without
checking whether there's any new work to do. The value
maxWriteoutWhenIdle
specifies the maximum amount of data
(default 64KB) that Polipo will write out without checking for new
activity.