Firefox is eating your SSD

Wrinkly

Wrinkly

Wrinkly

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If you are a user of Firefox we have a must-change setting. Today’s modern multi-core processor systems and higher quantities of RAM allow users to open multiple Firefox tabs and windows simultaneously. This can have an unintended effect for those SSDs as session store data can write data constantly to NAND. This issue is being discussed in a STH forum thread where you can follow the discussion.
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This is something that has been bothering myself for some time while never finding the time to look into properly. PC Perspective's podcast reminded of it and a quick google found a fix of sorts - https://www.servethehome.com/firefox-is-eating-your-ssd-here-is-how-to-fix-it/
 
I've pretty much abandoned Firefox because of its annoying problems.

Pottsey, why are you quoting the OP? It's fairly obvious you are going to be be replying to it...
 
spoffle said:
I've pretty much abandoned Firefox because of its annoying problems.

Pottsey, why are you quoting the OP? It's fairly obvious you are going to be be replying to it...
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Many years habit of hitting the quote button to reply to someone.
 
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I still prefer Firefox for general use mainly due to it's NoScript addon. For banking and goverment sites I have started using Edge. Opera is good to get around ISP blocking. And just to complicate things further I run several copies of each browser within various sandboxes using Sandboxie.

BTW the high disk usage is not limited to just Firefox.
 
I mainly use Chrome at the moment but that's probably just because I'm too lazy to change. Used to use Firefox all the time but then it got bloated too much. I wish there was a streamlined browser that stayed that way and I could just use something else if I needed more features.
 
A little snip from pcper.com -

A couple of weeks ago, I saw a post pop up on Twitter a few times about Firefox performing excessive writes to SSDs, which total up to 32GBs in a single day. The author attributes it mostly to a fast-updating session restore feature, although cookies were also resource hogs in their findings. In an update, they also tested Google Chrome, which, itself, clocked in over 24GB of writes in a day.
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Old news. It's why when I first got my SSD, I moved my user profile to a mechanical disk and allowed programs/windows to remain on the SSD.
 
Wrinkly said:
I still prefer Firefox for general use mainly due to it's NoScript addon. For banking and goverment sites I have started using Edge. Opera is good to get around ISP blocking. And just to complicate things further I run several copies of each browser within various sandboxes using Sandboxie.

BTW the high disk usage is not limited to just Firefox.
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VPN is best for getting around ISP blocking ;)
 
Wrinkly do you have any stats on reduction of io having reduced ff session backups ? (I assume history will still record sites visited between sess backups)
Like you said, i typically have several ff versions running for different tasks, and am seeing 10GB per day to ssd and would like to know how much that might be reduced (although my paging file also on ssd).

About netflix comments thought it was only edge(&ie11?) that can access 1080 netflix streams so far, so not just ff missing out.
 
I really wouldn't worry about 20GB or so writes from firefox to a SSD per day. There does still seem to be a lot of hysteria over writes to a SSD, it's largely unfounded.
 
I suppose with hdd / SMART I could have monitored IO too,
Have only switched at home in last 3months and given comparative expense I am more sensitized to longevity.
unlike hdd do not have (as much) noise to indicate if there is a lot of activity, so establishing IO seems useful, if anything, to ensure performance of other progams in not impacted by ff.
Do you think running the ssd with little spare space giving disproportionate wear on some 'sectors' is the more problematic issue. ?
 
BlackAle said:
I really wouldn't worry about 20GB or so writes from firefox to a SSD per day. There does still seem to be a lot of hysteria over writes to a SSD, it's largely unfounded.
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Agreed. The entire point of one is to improve performance, it's madness to then go moving pagefiles or frequently-used directories onto slow disks out of fear of "wearing it out".

Just use it.
 
This is more about "WTF is my browser writing 20GB per day to my drive" than "zomg my SSD is going to die".
 
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