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Heavy SSD Writes from Firefox

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Re: Heavy SSD Writes from Firefox

#121

Post by anubisresources »

m_rcin wrote: post #113
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…

Arch Wiki describes how to do it manually: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Firefox_on_RAM

Thank you! I've been looking for this for ages

Re: Heavy SSD Writes from Firefox

#123

Post by anubisresources »

m_rcin wrote: post #113
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…

Arch Wiki describes how to do it manually: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Firefox_on_RAM

Thank you! I've been looking for this for ages

Re: Heavy SSD Writes from Firefox

#124

Post by mrec »

Pxtl wrote: post #101
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.

I actually find that webGL-heavy sites like Google Maps are quite good at crashing FF.

Yep, StreetView in particular. And don't get me started on Shadertoy, which seems to make "crashing FF" its mission statement.

Re: Heavy SSD Writes from Firefox

#125

Post by krylon »

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.

It happens rarely to me, but it sometimes does. Also, your machine can crash, someone can trip over a power line, ...

At work, I routinely have something like 30-40 tabs open, if my browser can restore the session after a crash, that is very valuable to me.

Re: Heavy SSD Writes from Firefox

#126

Post by Yoric »

Hi, I’m one of the Firefox developers who was in charge of Session Restore, so I’m one of the culprits of this heavy SSD I/O. To make a long story short: we are aware of the problem, but fixing it for real requires completely re-architecturing Session Restore. That’s something we haven’t done yet, as Session Restore is rather safety-critical for many users, so this would need to be done very carefully, and with plenty of manpower.

I hope we can get around to doing it someday. Of course, as usual in an open-source project, contributors welcome :)

Re: Heavy SSD Writes from Firefox

#127

Post by Yoric »

pawadu wrote: post #40
raverbashing wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It doesn't save the whole page. Just the url, scrolling position, form data and session cookies. If you're browsing with 500 tabs, most of which contain nested frames, including Facebook "Like" icons and the like, that's actually quite a lot.

Re: Heavy SSD Writes from Firefox

#128

Post by sandGorgon »

weaksauce wrote: post #88
tofflos wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're in good shape. I'm at 337 tabs. ;-)

I made a simple firefox/chrome extension for people like you and me that horde tabs. You might find it useful to find tabs and quickly navigate to them by clicking on the link in the list. It's free and open source. The github page has a gif showing usage. Chrome Extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabist/hdjegjggiog... Firefox Extension: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tabist/ source…

this is brilliant. P.S. your chrome link is broken.

On suggestion - please give a button to save all of this as a "session" or something. I'm a tab hoarder and sometimes I just want to dump it somewhere and start afresh.

Please help me !

Re: Heavy SSD Writes from Firefox

#129

Post by necessity »

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 think there's something wrong with OP's Firefox. Looking at IO_WBYTES in htop I have exactly 42MB written after 2h11min of operation with 5+ tabs opened at any given time. I have my sessionstore.interval set to 1min. Assuming that if it ran 4x faster (default) it would write 4x more it should be 168MB in 2h of operation, whereas OP reports 1GB every 2h.

Re: Heavy SSD Writes from Firefox

#130

Post by nograpes »

Yoric wrote: post #126

Hi, I’m one of the Firefox developers who was in charge of Session Restore, so I’m one of the culprits of this heavy SSD I/O. To make a long story short: we are aware of the problem, but fixing it for real requires completely re-architecturing Session Restore. That’s something we haven’t done yet, as Session Restore is rather safety-critical for many users, so this would need to be done very carefully, and with plent…

What would an updated version of Session Restore look like? I mean, what would be your vision for a new version?
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