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Heavy SSD Writes from Firefox

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Re: Heavy SSD Writes from Firefox

#2

Post by HorizonXP »

Wow, that's really unfortunate.

I just built a new PC with SSDs, and switched back to Firefox. Even with 16GB of RAM on an i3-2120, Firefox still hiccups and lags when I open new tabs or try to scroll.

This new issue of it prematurely wearing out my SSDs will just push me to Chrome. Hopefully it doesn't have the same issues.

Re: Heavy SSD Writes from Firefox

#3

Post by vesinisa »

I've already moved all my browser profiles to `/tmp` and set up a bootscripts to persist them during boot / shutdown. E.g. for Arch Linux see https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/profile-sync-daemon

This is a far superior solution to fiddling with configuration options in each individual product to avoid wearing down your SSD with constant writes. Murphy's law has it such hacks will only be frustrated by next version upgrade.

And no, using Chrome does not help. All browsers that use disk caching or complex state on disk are fundamentally heavy on writes to an SSD. The amount of traffic itself is not even a particularly good measure of SSD wear, since writing a single kilobyte of data on an SSD can not be achieved on HW level without rewriting the whole page, which is generally several megabytes in size. So changing a single byte in a file is no less taxing than a huge 4 MB write.

Re: Heavy SSD Writes from Firefox

#5

Post by overcast »

HorizonXP wrote: post #2

Wow, that's really unfortunate. I just built a new PC with SSDs, and switched back to Firefox. Even with 16GB of RAM on an i3-2120, Firefox still hiccups and lags when I open new tabs or try to scroll. This new issue of it prematurely wearing out my SSDs will just push me to Chrome. Hopefully it doesn't have the same issues.

You need to enable multiprocess in Firefox, so the thing doesn't shit the bed on you constantly.

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis

Re: Heavy SSD Writes from Firefox

#6

Post by blinkingled »

Even better just disable session restore entirely - Browser.sessionstore.enabled - Since Firefox 3.5 this preference is superseded with setting browser.sessionstore.max_tabs_undo and browser.sessionstore.max_windows_undo to 0.

As I understand this feature is there so if the browser crashes it can restore your windows and tabs - I don't remember having a browser crash on me since the demise of Flash.

Re: Heavy SSD Writes from Firefox

#7

Post by gcp »

RussianCow wrote: post #4

Serious question: Is 12GB a day really going to make a dent in your SSD's lifespan? I was under the impression that, with modern SSDs, you basically didn't have to worry about this stuff.

Samsung's low cost line is under warranty up to 40TB/year. Tests have shown that the actual drive lifetime is several times that.

So basically, no, you don't have to worry about this. Essentially, people are complaining that the disks they bought are being used for their intended purpose: making sure your data doesn't disappear on a power loss.

Re: Heavy SSD Writes from Firefox

#8

Post by lighttower »

Chrome, on my system, is even more abusive. Watch the size of the .config/google-chrome directory and you'll see that it grows to multi-GB in the profile file.

There is a Linux utility that takes care of all browsers' abuse of your ssd called profile sync daemon, PSD. It's available in the debian repo or [1] for Ubuntu or [2] for source. It uses `overlay` filesystem to direct all writes to ram and only syncs back to disc the deltas every n minutes using rsync. Been using this for years. You can also manually alleviate some of this by setting up a tmpfs and symlink .cache to it.

[1] https://launchpad.net/~graysky/+archive/ubuntu/utils [2] https://github.com/graysky2/profile-sync-daemon

EDIT: Add link, grammar

EDIT2: Add link to source

Re: Heavy SSD Writes from Firefox

#10

Post by gcp »

blinkingled wrote: post #6

Even better just disable session restore entirely - Browser.sessionstore.enabled - Since Firefox 3.5 this preference is superseded with setting browser.sessionstore.max_tabs_undo and browser.sessionstore.max_windows_undo to 0. As I understand this feature is there so if the browser crashes it can restore your windows and tabs - I don't remember having a browser crash on me since the demise of Flash.

It'll also cover OS crashes or power failures. Agreed that those aren't very common either.
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