While observing browser behaviour during the watching of a Twitch stream, I noticed that the video player (or some interaction between the video player and the browser; Firefox on Linux) was causing video blobs (parts of the stream sent to my computer) to be placed into the browser's disk cache, filling it somewhat quickly.

This does not happen with YouTube's player on the same browser and OS, which would appear to operate entirely in memory.

As a result of this cache usage, there are thousands of SSD writes which may be shortening the lifespan of Twitch viewers' hardware.

There are ways to turn off cacheing in Firefox or otherwise trick the OS into putting cache into memory (at the cost of losing cache every reboot), but not all users have the capability to set this up, nor would these workarounds necessarily be to everyone's taste even where they have the ability to implement them.

Thus the issue would be best resolved by having Twitch's video player not use cache in this way.