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Heavy SSD Writes from Firefox

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131–140 of 361 posts

Re: Heavy SSD Writes from Firefox

#131

Post by witty_username »

blinkingled wrote: post #29
raverbashing wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't remember the last time Chrome crashed. Rarely one tab crashes (usually due to Adobe Flash).

Re: Heavy SSD Writes from Firefox

#132

Post by brador »

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…

> Session Restore is rather safety-critical for many users

Maybe you could give users the option? (until it can be fixed fully)

Re: Heavy SSD Writes from Firefox

#134

Post by fulafel »

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…

How about this: 29 out of 30 times, save only a diff to the previous data. 1 out of 30 times, save the complete data in compressed form.

(I'm guessing there must already be functionality to diff a bunch of JSON somewhere in the millions of lines of code).

Though I'm sure this doesn't make usually make a dent in a SSD's lifetime. But there are still people running Firefox on low end Android phones with meager flash, and Raspberry Pis with SD cards.

Re: Heavy SSD Writes from Firefox

#135

Post by sangnoir »

gcp wrote: post #93
rayiner wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're still using 1/4 of your write unendurable for your fricking web browser. And exceeding the endurance rating can make you ineligible for warranty service/replacement of the drive.

I dunno but I think plenty of people consider their web browser a pretty vital application.

> I dunno but I think plenty of people consider their web browser a pretty vital application.

No one is arguing against that point. However, most people do not need their browser state to be needlessly backed-up that aggressively (every 15 seconds - which is about the same time it took me to type everything before this sentence). I'm OK with losing up to 20 minutes of my state in a browser. Most work done in a browser is usually synced to an upstream browser every few minutes - auto saved emails or multi-step web-apps.

Re: Heavy SSD Writes from Firefox

#137

Post by gcp »

fulafel wrote: post #134
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…

How about this: 29 out of 30 times, save only a diff to the previous data. 1 out of 30 times, save the complete data in compressed form. (I'm guessing there must already be functionality to diff a bunch of JSON somewhere in the millions of lines of code). Though I'm sure this doesn't make usually make a dent in a SSD's lifetime. But there are still people running Firefox on low end Android phones with meager flash, a…

You also need to handle all corner cases where one of the intermediary diffs gets corrupted (you can't generally assume in a program like Firefox that data you write out is going to be readable in the future because lol common hardware). Or where the diffs are larger than a fresh snapshot. And you absolutely can't get it wrong.

It's something that sounds easy until you actually try to get it coded up and shipping.

I explained below that this thing isn't a factor for Android because the program gets suspended.

Re: Heavy SSD Writes from Firefox

#139

Post by gcp »

brador wrote: post #132
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…

> Session Restore is rather safety-critical for many users Maybe you could give users the option? (until it can be fixed fully)

That's what the interval config setting is for?

Re: Heavy SSD Writes from Firefox

#140

Post by gcp »

pixl97 wrote: post #111
gcp wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would it be unnecessary? The amount of data follows rather logically from the amount of website state it's capturing, and the interval seems totally like personal preference to me. Would you rather lose 60 seconds of work or 15? Uh, I'll take less data loss.

In a web browser? You're acting like the browser is a major local storage application (like excel for example), almost everything I'm going to be working on is an online application, and it takes care of storing my data on the server infrastructure. So yea, 15 seconds or 60 seconds isn't going to be a major 'data loss' issue either way.

it takes care of storing my data on the server infrastructure

Do you manually hit the save button every 15 seconds?

Some webapps do this for you. Some do not. Firefox has got your ass covered even for those that do not.

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