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Heavy SSD Writes from Firefox

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Re: Heavy SSD Writes from Firefox

#281
post #213

So Firefox is also expensive to run in terms of energy consumption. No wonder the fans on my MacBook Pro always sound like a jet engine whenever I have several tabs open. Seriously! Disclaimer: I dual boot (camp) windows 7 on my mac.

I doubt the cpu load of session restore is responsible for the fans kicking in...

Re: Heavy SSD Writes from Firefox

#282
post #71
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I certainly care about it, although it's possible that my 50-odd browser tabs would be considered "clutter" by other people. I stopped using Edge because it only saves your tab session if you turn off the PC, not if you quit the browser. Mind you, for a while I ran Firefox using a RAMdisc for the profile simply because all that flushing makes a big negative impact on PC performance.

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

I had about ~250 tabs and i closed them now. Bookmarked before. This "feature" of FF is rly cucking. I have tons of GB written to my SSD without any benefit (i not a "safety critical user"). And the worst thing is, all of this data was written into 40 GB of SSD space.

this session restore feature, lets just save the urls in a list. that data structure cant be GB of GB right! ;) I think thats enough for the, lets say, typical FF user.

Now, that i know about this issue, i will bring down my tab usage to no more than 10 tabs.

Re: Heavy SSD Writes from Firefox

#283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Session store contains open tabs, windows, history for each tab, form fields, referrers (so we can re-request the page correctly), titles (so we can restore tabs without re-fetching every page), favicons, charsets, some timestamps, extension data, some kinds of site storage, scroll positions, and a few other things. The goal of session restore is to restore your session -- your open tabs should come back, the same pa…

I'd wish they'd also restore themselves to the proper location on the proper virtual desktop. With hundreds of windows, typically organized by task, I dread having to reorganize things every time Firefox (or the computer) restarts. Someday the pain may motivate me to try to learn enough about Firefox's internals to do it. :)

Definitely worth filing a bug in bugzilla if they are not on the right virtual desktop... it might take years to get fixed, but they do generally get round to it.

Re: Heavy SSD Writes from Firefox

#284
I checked my system - Firefox wasn't writing much and what it is writing is going to my user directory on the hard drive instead of the program directory on the SSD, so that's nice. But still, I don't want my browser cluttering up my drive with unnecessary junk - history, persistent caching from previous sessions, old tracking cookies, nevermind a constant backup of the state of everything. I try to turn all that off, but there's always one more hidden thing like this.

If I want to save something, I'll download it. If I want to come back, I'll bookmark it. Other than those two cases and settings changes, all of which are triggered by my explicit choice & action, it really shouldn't be writing/saving/storing anything. Would be nice if there were a lightweight/portable/'clean' option or version.

When I tried Spotify, it was pretty bad about that too - created many gigabytes of junk in the background and never cleaned up after itself. I made a scheduled task to delete it all daily, but eventually just stopped using spotify.

Re: Heavy SSD Writes from Firefox

#285
post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd wish they'd also restore themselves to the proper location on the proper virtual desktop. With hundreds of windows, typically organized by task, I dread having to reorganize things every time Firefox (or the computer) restarts. Someday the pain may motivate me to try to learn enough about Firefox's internals to do it. :)

Definitely worth filing a bug in bugzilla if they are not on the right virtual desktop... it might take years to get fixed, but they do generally get round to it.

Or generations, you know? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11951413

Re: Heavy SSD Writes from Firefox

#286
post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

because not losing data is infinitely better than saving your ssd life a couple years. we've had ssds for a long time now. still waiting for one to die on me. meanwhile I'm on my 27th dead spinning disk.

I am one of those people who sets browser to dump all cookies, cache and and history upon closing, so I'm not really sure what data would be lost.

Do you ever miss the upside of all that persistence? I find my history useful, I find continually re-logging in a pain (obviously excepting the kind of sites where I don't want my login to persist i.e. financial etc).

However I also only close my browser once every couple of weeks as well. System updates etc.

Re: Heavy SSD Writes from Firefox

#287
post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does that much data get into Session Restore? Mine are only about 3KB per tab, and Firefox starts melting at more than a thousand tabs.

I seem to remember that DOM Session Storage and Session Cookies are pretty big offenders. Other websites (e.g. Google Docs) use lots and lots and lots of hidden forms to remember lots and lots and lots of data. Also, people who keep Session Restore tabs open (you know, the tab that lets you restore your session, when you have crashed) and continue browsing – Firefox needs to store several nested Session Restore JSON…

I've always been impressed by that, because it's essentially bullet-proof.

Re: Heavy SSD Writes from Firefox

#288

I checked my system - Firefox wasn't writing much and what it is writing is going to my user directory on the hard drive instead of the program directory on the SSD, so that's nice. But still, I don't want my browser cluttering up my drive with unnecessary junk - history, persistent caching from previous sessions, old tracking cookies, nevermind a constant backup of the state of everything. I try to turn all that off…

It's overwriting a few files when the data they contain changes; it's not leaving a huge pile of unused data to clutter up your disk.

Re: Heavy SSD Writes from Firefox

#289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Long time Netscape/ firefox user here: 1. Thanks for your work. 2. How do I really contribute? Could you link to what I need to do to start working on this now ? I'm affected by this problem ame want to figure out if I can fix it.

http://whatcanidoformozilla.org is a good starting point.

"Please enable JavaScript in your browser!"

That advice was a lot simpler than I thought it would be.

Re: Heavy SSD Writes from Firefox

#290
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…

Like Word did? :)
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