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Heavy SSD Writes from Firefox

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Re: Heavy SSD Writes from Firefox

#11

Post by LukeShu »

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.

Other things than a browser crash can cause the browser to unexpectedly quit. For example, a battery dying, or the power going out.

Re: Heavy SSD Writes from Firefox

#12

Post by daveguy »

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.

If you can get a petabyte of r/w out of an SSD then 12 GB/day (of writes only) will exhaust the device in 228 years (1 PB * 1000 TB/PB * 1000 GB/TB / 12 GB/Day / 365 Days/Year).

If there is also an associated 12 GB/day of reads then half that estimate (unlikely to be equal due to the nature of the cache). Either way -- not a significant degradation.

Edit: Degradation or not -- i'd personally rather have my drive resources available. In the context switch from firefox the cache process could interfere with loading other data.

Re: Heavy SSD Writes from Firefox

#14

Post by blinkingled »

LukeShu wrote: post #11
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.

Other things than a browser crash can cause the browser to unexpectedly quit. For example, a battery dying, or the power going out.

Right but that doesn't happen quite often either. Also if it does how important is restoring the tabs and windows? Probably not to a lot of people other than serious creators that use a web editor of some sort that'll lose work if the browser disappears. Even then it is flaky to rely on something like this. Much better to have periodic backups of whatever you're doing.

Re: Heavy SSD Writes from Firefox

#16

Post by gcp »

leeoniya wrote: post #15

i'm not seeing these numbers, using I/O columns in Process Explorer. i'm running Nightly Portable with maybe 80 tabs open/restored.

Nightly Portable might have this particular setting changed, because the lifetime of random USB sticks is surely going to be much less than a real SSD.

Re: Heavy SSD Writes from Firefox

#19

Post by leeoniya »

gcp wrote: post #16
leeoniya wrote: post #15

i'm not seeing these numbers, using I/O columns in Process Explorer. i'm running Nightly Portable with maybe 80 tabs open/restored.

Nightly Portable might have this particular setting changed, because the lifetime of random USB sticks is surely going to be much less than a real SSD.

i thought that too but the interval setting is at 15000 in the config, so maybe something else is optimizing it out?
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