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Heavy SSD Writes from Firefox

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Re: Heavy SSD Writes from Firefox

#21

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.

Replace Browser Crash with: Accidentally pressing Ctrl-w

And yes, there are browser crashes without Flash

Re: Heavy SSD Writes from Firefox

#25
post #7

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.

Not everyone buys Samsung, there are a lot of cheap SSD's out there that are rated for only a handful of TB's a year.

There is also a case of the silly SSHD's or w/e which combine a tiny SSD and a mechanical component which can die considerably faster.

Overall the amount of writes an SSD can handle is tied directly to it's capacity since it determines the amount of average writes per a given time unit that each cell will experience as long as the firmware actually does it's job (in Samsung's case it may very well not do it as they had more than a few firmware screw ups in the past).

This can also more severely affect you if you have a medium sized drive (say 128-256GB) but it's pretty full.

A good SSD's will move things around somewhat to even out the wear but it still increases the amount of writes you have.

If your SSD does have an "even wear" feature when you write 12GB to drive which is say 50% or more full it usually triggers more than 12GB of effective writes in the drive itself as the firmware would move already written data around to ensure that every cell has been written to approximately the same amount (if you say only have 20GB of free space and you write 12GB daily and delete it, your effective writes would be closer to the full capacity of the drive per day than to 12GB).

You also have a lot of embedded/mobile devices which use considerably shittier storage than modern SSD's, you can easily chew through a SD card or a similarly rated flash storage with anywhere between a few 100's of gigs to only a handful of TB's (or a only few times the capacity of the card if buy bargain bin memory cards).

Since these machines are more commonly used these days it's not a feature that should be so quickly obfuscated from the user since it doesn't seem like there is an "intelligence" behind how conservative or not the browser is with writes to local storage.

If you install firefox on an SBC/netbook/microcomputer or even a mobile phone (if this affects the mobile version also) with eMMC/MMC only rated storage 12 gigs a day can and will kill it rather quickly.

Re: Heavy SSD Writes from Firefox

#27

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.

Anecdote; I have had one of the OG intel x-25 80GB MLC SSD drives and after 5+ years of usage first as a boot drive and now as a video editing scratch disk the wear leveling firmware has done an excellent job. Intel's monitoring software still claims the disk has 95% of it's write capacity remaining and I have not observed any changes to it's benchmark IO performance over the life of the drive.

Re: Heavy SSD Writes from Firefox

#28
post #5

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

Look out for addons. Electrolysis will still not work with many of them. I force enabled it a few weeks ago, and discovered that it's disabled for good reasons.

Re: Heavy SSD Writes from Firefox

#29

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.

Replace Browser Crash with: Accidentally pressing Ctrl-w And yes, there are browser crashes without Flash

Hmm I really haven't had FF or Chrome crash on me since a long time - I do browse a lot. I can't be that lucky. I am not saying it doesn't happen - I am saying it's so infrequent that it's just better to deal with it when it happens instead of killing your SSD with constant writes of 15GB per day. Most people don't do anything that needs to be recovered by a crashed browser.

Re: Heavy SSD Writes from Firefox

#30

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.

Some cheap drives (e.g. Crucial BX100) have an endurance rating of only about 40GB/day.
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