In Linux where should this be written? Inside the home folder? Maybe moving this folder to a HDD should suffice.
Or ramdisk if you have a stable system.
Heavy SSD Writes from Firefox
31–40 of 361 posts
Re: Heavy SSD Writes from Firefox
#32Wow, 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
Heh. Tried that out and while it didn't affect stability it made switching tabs take 2-3s on a haswell system. By disabling all extensions with it I was able to somewhat match performance of non-multiprocess.
Re: Heavy SSD Writes from Firefox
#33Yep, I have a brand new SSD drive that over the course of a few months accumulated several TERAbytes (yes - TERA) of writes directly attributable to the default FF browser session sync interval coupled with the fact I leave it open 24/7 with tons of open tabs.
Once I noticed that excessive writes were occurring, it was easy for me to identify FF as the culprit in Process Hacker but it took much longer to figure out why FF was doing it.
Re: Heavy SSD Writes from Firefox
#34Even 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
Who really cares about restoring browser state? Maybe I lose part of an HN or Facebook post I'd been writing, but that's it. The feature should be opt-in, IMHO.
Re: Heavy SSD Writes from Firefox
#35That goes to show how space/memory hungry and bloated browsers have become.
Re: Heavy SSD Writes from Firefox
#36It’s always annoying when an issue like this is reported yet no bugzilla reports are mentioned. Has anyone else filed this already, or shall I?
Re: Heavy SSD Writes from Firefox
#37Even 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.
> I don't remember having a browser crash on me since the demise of Flash.
Just try browsing reddit with the RES extension or streaming heavy data for a few seconds (like a server side PDF processor that takes more than 30 seconds to finish, it's the same old behavior of blocking JS dialogs from years ago, white screen of death). When I'm using a iGPU (512MB) and I open some heavy images in sequence the browser crashes after a certain amount of time but this time it freezes the entire computer for a few seconds, so I suspect it's OOM (iGPU). I never bothered looking for a solution, nowadays I don't even care when my browser ocasionally crashes. My overall desktop (software) experience gets worse every year so I have gone used to it.
But Firefox still is my favorite browser and I wouldn't trade it for anything else!
Re: Heavy SSD Writes from Firefox
#38Wow, 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.
My home desktop is an i5-1620 with 64G RAM running Ubuntu 16.04, and Firefox just hiccups and lags, period. It is sad.
I need to find time to experiment with Chrome while blocking all the Google chatter to see how functional it remains without being able to tattle to the mothership (otherwise I won't use it).
Re: Heavy SSD Writes from Firefox
#39Serious 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.
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Re: Heavy SSD Writes from Firefox
#40Even 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
Why should it save the whole page when it only needs to remember the URL? At most, maybe also any form data you have entered. Small enough to keep thousands of pages in memory.