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Heavy SSD Writes from Firefox

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Re: Heavy SSD Writes from Firefox

#164
post #85
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Anybody buying a drive so cheap it can't handle Firefox is probably putting the drive in a machine so cheap that it will only be lasting 3-4 years maximum anyway.

Re: Heavy SSD Writes from Firefox

#166
post #94

Putting aside how this may not be all that bad for most SSD's, does anyone know when this behavior started? Firefox really started to annoy me with its constant and needless updates a few months back; the tipping point being breaking almost all legacy extensions (in 46, I believe). This totally broke the Zend Debugger extension, the only way forward would be to totally change my development environment. I'm 38 and no…

Much of the recent breakage was to introduce essential features that users have been loudly asking for for years, such as multi-process support and content processes in a security sandbox. If you're intentionally running very old versions which by now have published exploits, then I can see that these are not things you would consider important.

In the end: Thank you for your comment : ) My annoyance with the plugin situation, and at first, no resolution for it, was fixed in 45: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/add-on-signing-in-firef...

I'm now running the latest version of FF, but still able to use my plugin.

Re: Heavy SSD Writes from Firefox

#167
post #67

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.…

I don't think the use of SQLite is a problem, since it can be configured to be very careful or very reckless.

http://www.sqlite.org/pragma.html#pragma_synchronous

Re: Heavy SSD Writes from Firefox

#168

Putting aside how this may not be all that bad for most SSD's, does anyone know when this behavior started? Firefox really started to annoy me with its constant and needless updates a few months back; the tipping point being breaking almost all legacy extensions (in 46, I believe). This totally broke the Zend Debugger extension, the only way forward would be to totally change my development environment. I'm 38 and no…

This has been the case for a long time, I just googled and first hit was an article from 2008. source: http://www.ghacks.net/2008/07/09/change-the-session-store-in...

Wikipedia claims the session restore features was added with 2006's 2.0 release. That's what I would have guessed, since that release was (famously) a giant step backwards in performance, which was never really addressed except by waiting for hardware to improve.

I'm holding out hope that whoever's responsible for Firefox abandoning "good, light, cross-platform web browser" as its differentiator stays away from Servo, at least for a while. That's a niche that's unserved currently, AFAIK.

Re: Heavy SSD Writes from Firefox

#169
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…

Why not leave the existing code (SR1) as is and rebuild Session Restore 2 (SR2); keep using SR1 until it has nothing to restore and then use SR2 moving forward.

Re: Heavy SSD Writes from Firefox

#170
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I am not understanding this right, but is this saying that Firefox will continually keep writing to the disk while idle? Does anyone know more about this? Why would this be needed to restore session/tabs? This is very much the feature working as intended: Firefox captures webpage state every 15 seconds, so a crash, power outage, accidentally closing the browser etc will not result in data loss for the user. For…

I understand that pages can change their state without user interaction, but shouldn't the browser only write to disk when that actually happens? The browser has to be able to detect when these changes happen right? I understand that it's probably not an issue for most users/SSDs. However, if I open just a static HTML file and leave it idle, I don't think the browser should be continually writing to disk. If it is, t…

In Firefox, it might look like it's doing requests, however it'll show me a days-old HN newspage that it cannot possibly get from the server.
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