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Heavy SSD Writes from Firefox

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Re: Heavy SSD Writes from Firefox

#51

Post by bjt2n3904 »

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.

Sad that the crash feature (which I don't particularly like or use) is directly tied to the undo close tab feature (which I do).

I don't like the anxiety of opening Firefox in front of someone, and wondering if my previous tabs will pop up.

Re: Heavy SSD Writes from Firefox

#52

Post by tekacs »

robin_reala wrote: post #36

It’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?

If it's not already listed there, please do (and post the URL here!)

I was thinking the same and will do so myself, if no-one else reports doing so.

Re: Heavy SSD Writes from Firefox

#53

Post by anexprogrammer »

overcast wrote: post #5
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

Nice idea but a load of useful extensions don't work with it. Of extensions I use noscript and 1password were the main ones, but around half were tagged as not compatible.

Re: Heavy SSD Writes from Firefox

#54

Post by dsr_ »

dogma1138 wrote: post #25
gcp wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Android Firefox has this set to 10 seconds, rather than the 15 on a desktop.

Re: Heavy SSD Writes from Firefox

#55

Post by SubiculumCode »

__jal wrote: post #38
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.

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).

Hiccups and lags are seen in all browsers and is due to bloated websites. Also, Chrome will write just as much to your SSD as Firefox

Re: Heavy SSD Writes from Firefox

#57

Post by Osmose »

garaetjjte wrote: post #50
raverbashing wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Ctrl-W is not that bad, but I sometimes want to close tab by Ctrl-W but instead hit Ctrl-Q...

I use https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/cmd-q-catcher... to force me to hit it twice to actually quit. Dunno if it works on platforms besides Mac though.

Re: Heavy SSD Writes from Firefox

#58

Post by tsukikage »

The interesting question here is, why is the browser writing data to disk at this rate?

If it's genuinely receiving new data at this rate, that's kind of concerning for those of us on capped/metered mobile connections. The original article mentions that cookies accounted for the bulk of the writes, which is distressing.

If it's not, using incremental deltas is surely a no-brainer here?

Re: Heavy SSD Writes from Firefox

#59

Post by lighttower »

pawadu wrote: post #41
lighttower wrote: post #8

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…

What is the typical memory usage of this for normal web browsing?

`mount -l` shows a filesystem of type `overlay` for each browser (in my case, chromium, chrome, firefox). Range from 50MB to 200MB. I have it to sync to disc every 15min - so I reckon it empties out the ram whenever it syncs. I've never had a problem (8GB of ram on the machine I initially installed it on) so I haven't watched to see what the max size is. The developer [1] is great - issues are resolved very quickly.

[1] https://github.com/graysky2/profile-sync-daemon

Re: Heavy SSD Writes from Firefox

#60

Post by brianwawok »

__jal wrote: post #38
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.

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).

Why not Chromium?
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