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Heavy SSD Writes from Firefox

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Re: Heavy SSD Writes from Firefox

#61

Post by MikeTV »

rayiner wrote: post #34
raverbashing wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Hadn't thought about it until now, but this feature may be why I don't see "I wrote you a long message but accidentally closed the tab / hit the back button / my computer crashed and I lost it, so here's the highlights I remember" emails from friends and family anymore. I would much rather discover this caveat and opt out than expect my grandmother to know it's even possible to opt in.

Re: Heavy SSD Writes from Firefox

#62

Post by nathancahill »

Osmose wrote: post #57
garaetjjte wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thanks, I do that all the time. Installed.

Re: Heavy SSD Writes from Firefox

#63

Post by creshal »

dsr_ wrote: post #54
dogma1138 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And Pale Moon (Firefox fork) to 60.

Re: Heavy SSD Writes from Firefox

#64

Post by gcp »

dsr_ wrote: post #54
dogma1138 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Android suspends backgrounded applications, and will kill them at will, so that actually makes a lot of sense: you have less risk of data loss, and the write issue doesn't exist unless you leave the browser in the foreground 24/7 (and the phone unlocked with the screen on etc).

Re: Heavy SSD Writes from Firefox

#65

Post by dogma1138 »

dsr_ wrote: post #54
dogma1138 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't know what this translates too for a mobile device, I don't know if it stores the same data, and how does the fact that mobile sites tend to be light affects it.

Other things like add ons, amount of tabs open and etc. could also affect it.

Would be interesting to see if some one has SBC's with either SD or onboard eMMC rated storage to run this test and see how much is being written too and calculate just how much of the lifespan of the storage is being reduced due to this.

IIRC even the iPhone 6s still uses TLC flash for it's storage, TLC is only good for about 500-1000 P/E cycles, so it needs pretty good capacity overhead and well "TLC" to live long.

In comparison SLC gets you over 100K P/E cycles these days, MLC can get to over 30K.

Also if anyone knows if mobile phones do wear leveling for their eMMC/MMC storage I would love to know that ;)

Re: Heavy SSD Writes from Firefox

#66

Post by gcp »

creshal wrote: post #63
dsr_ wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

And Pale Moon (Firefox fork) to 60.

Firefox's session restore code was recently rewritten. Given that Pale Moon is based on an outdated fork, it's not clear the behavior is comparable, or that the setting means the same.

Re: Heavy SSD Writes from Firefox

#67

Post by zbuf »

I have been running Firefox for a long time with an LD_PRELOAD wrapper which turns fsync() and sync() into a no-op.

I feel it's little antisocial for regular desktop apps to assume it's for them to do this.

Chrome is also a culprit, a similar sync'ing caused us problems at my employer's, inflated pressure on an NFS server where /home directories are network mounts. Even where we already put the cache to a local disk.

At the bottom of these sorts of cases I have on more than one occasion found an SQLite database. I can see its benefit as a file format, but I don't think we need full database-like synchronisation on things like cookie updates; I would prefer to lose a few seconds (or minutes) of cookie updates on power loss than over-inflate the I/O requirements.

Re: Heavy SSD Writes from Firefox

#68

Post by raverbashing »

rayiner wrote: post #34
raverbashing wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, if you only write on Fb or HN I see why you're not missing nothing

Re: Heavy SSD Writes from Firefox

#69

Post by raverbashing »

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...

Ah that's what I mean

Re: Heavy SSD Writes from Firefox

#70

Post by gcp »

rayiner wrote: post #30
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.

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

So even with a cheap drive, if you leave your browser open with tons of tabs, and the PC on 24/7, it'll still easily handle it?

Real lifetimes are often a multitude of the endurance rating, BTW.

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