Adjust This Setting Before Firefox Wears Down Your SSD Drive
According to the tech experts from ServeTheHome, a Firefox browser in its default configuration can write between 10GB and 30GB per day to SSD drives, depending on the number of opened tabs and windows.
The main two reasons behind these heavy-duty SSD write operations are the recovery.js and cookie.* files.
Firefox uses the first file to store session information used to recover after crashes, and the second files are created on a per-site basis to store cookie-related data.
As the user browses the Internet, Firefox will update these files at regular intervals, generating a large amount of constant write operations.
Some fixes are available for Firefox
Sergei Bobik of ServeTheHome , who discovered this issue, says there’s a way to limit some of the write operations for the recovery.js file by tweaking one of Firefox’s settings.
Adjusting this setting is easy. Users should type “about:config” in their address bar and press Enter. Here they should search for “browser.sessionstore.interval” and double-click the option to change it.
The default is “15000” which is 15 seconds, the interval at which Firefox re-writes the contents of the recovery.js file. One second is 1000, so if you want to set this to five minutes you should enter 300000, and if you want to use 30 minutes you should enter 1800000.
Chrome seems to generate the same operations as well
Early experiments show a similar behavior for Chrome, which also generates around 1GB per hour, which rounds up to around 24GB per day.
“Those [SSD] drives can be rated for about 20GB of writes per day and Firefox [or Chrome] alone might be using more than half of that,” Bobik warns users using SSD drives.
Source: Softpedia
