If you’ve ever experienced an issue with Google Drive on Android (such as slow performance, crashing, or other oddities), very often those issues can be traced back to the size of the configured cache for the app. This is especially true when you’re dealing with larger files and if you often take advantage of the offline feature.

Fortunately, Google has taken this into consideration and given the users the ability to configure the cache size for the Drive app. Configuring this isn’t even remotely challenging. You should know, however, depending upon the specs of your device, you need to use caution when configuring the cache size. Say, for example, you use a low-end device with minimal free storage space and a small amount of RAM. In such a case, you would not want to maximize the cache for Drive.

That being said, let’s take a look at how to configure the cache size for Google Drive.

Configuring the cache

Open up the Google Drive App on your Android device. Tap the “hamburger menu” (three horizontal lines in the upper left corner), scroll down on the sidebar, and tap Settings. In the resulting window, scroll down and tap Cache size. In the resulting window (Figure A), tap to enable the cache size best suited for your device.

Figure A

The default size is 250 MB. If you configure the cache higher than the default, and you notice a degradation in overall performance of your device, you can lower it back to 250 MB. Or, if a higher cache works well for your needs and you notice a slowdown after a while, you can come back into the Drive Settings window and tap Clear cache to free up the space (knowing it will build up again).

Enjoy a better Drive

And that’s all there is to it. You should now see a better (and more reliable) performance with the Google Drive app. You’ll be surprised how much better Drive will work when you give the cache a bit of attention.