Heavy SSD Writes from Firefox

[garry]

https://www.servethehome.com/firefox-is ... to-fix-it/


-Heavy SSD Writes from Firefox

............
Purely by chance, I fired up a free copy of SSDLife on two consecutive days where I haven’t really used my workstation for anything other than email and browsing.
For those of you unfamiliar with this tool, it simply reports estimated lifetime for the attached SSD and it also shows the amount of data read and written.

In my case, SSDLife notified me that 12GB was written to the SSD in one day.
Since I didn’t recall downloading any huge files over the previous day or visiting any new sites that could’ve resulted in bringing down a lot of new content to the cache,
this puzzled me.

...
... that this behavior is controlled by a parameter that you can access through typing “about:config” in the address bar.
This parameter is called:

—browser.sessionstore.interval

It is set to 15 seconds by default.

In my case, I reset it to a more sane (at least for me) 30 minutes.

Since then, I’m only seeing about 2GB written to disk when my workstation is left idle, which still feels like a lot but is 5 times less than before.
Bottom line is that if you have a lower capacity consumer level SSDs in some of your machines, you may want to check and tweak your Firefox config.
Those drives can be rated for about 20GB of writes per day and Firefox alone might be using more than half of that.

[guest3456]

you may also want to look google using a "ram disk" especially for browse cache type stuff. usually they are used for their speed benefits, but browser caching does do a lot of disk i/o as you're noticing