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How to stop Firefox from spinning up the disk?

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  • Last reply by cokolwiek

cokolwiek
cokolwiek
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I'm still using a regular, spinning disk and Firefox is constantly waking it up. 

# iotop -obtqqq
05:54:50 14174 be/4 rmo         0.00 B/s   50.41 K/s  0.00 %  0.00 % firefox
05:54:53   394 be/3 root        0.00 B/s    0.00 B/s  0.00 %  0.21 % [jbd2/dm-1-8]
05:55:03 16846 be/4 rmo         0.00 B/s   34.81 K/s  0.00 %  0.00 % firefox
05:55:05 16846 be/4 rmo         0.00 B/s    0.00 B/s  0.00 % 99.99 % firefox
05:55:05   394 be/3 root        0.00 B/s    0.00 B/s  0.00 %  0.25 % [jbd2/dm-1-8]
05:55:08 14103 be/4 rmo       111.64 K/s    0.00 B/s  0.00 %  8.26 % firefox
05:55:10   394 be/3 root        0.00 B/s    0.00 B/s  0.00 %  0.26 % [jbd2/dm-1-8]
05:55:10 16846 be/4 rmo         0.00 B/s  100.30 K/s  0.00 %  0.18 % firefox
05:55:10 14103 be/4 rmo         0.00 B/s  100.30 K/s  0.00 %  0.00 % firefox
05:55:13   394 be/3 root        0.00 B/s    0.00 B/s  0.00 %  0.28 % [jbd2/dm-1-8]
05:55:13 16846 be/4 rmo         0.00 B/s   88.24 K/s  0.00 %  0.12 % firefox

Virtually any action taken (especially closing a tab, any tab) causes the above. I moved ~/.mozilla and ~/.fonts to a tmpfs which once used to be enough to make the disk spin-ups reasonable but not any more.

I changed the disk cache dirs

browser.cache.disk.parent_directory → string → /tmp browser.cache.offline.parent_directory → string → /tmp

to /tmp, which is also a tmpfs. Then I disabled disk cache

browser.cache.disk.enable False browser.cache.memory.enable True

but nothing seems to stop this crazy behaviour. What more can I do?

I looked through lsof and strace, Firefox seems to also be using /var/cache/fontconfig/ and .cache/fontconfig/ do I need to move those, too?

This is on Ubuntu 13.04 with Firefox 21.

I'm still using a regular, spinning disk and Firefox is constantly waking it up. <pre><nowiki># iotop -obtqqq 05:54:50 14174 be/4 rmo 0.00 B/s 50.41 K/s 0.00 % 0.00 % firefox 05:54:53 394 be/3 root 0.00 B/s 0.00 B/s 0.00 % 0.21 % [jbd2/dm-1-8] 05:55:03 16846 be/4 rmo 0.00 B/s 34.81 K/s 0.00 % 0.00 % firefox 05:55:05 16846 be/4 rmo 0.00 B/s 0.00 B/s 0.00 % 99.99 % firefox 05:55:05 394 be/3 root 0.00 B/s 0.00 B/s 0.00 % 0.25 % [jbd2/dm-1-8] 05:55:08 14103 be/4 rmo 111.64 K/s 0.00 B/s 0.00 % 8.26 % firefox 05:55:10 394 be/3 root 0.00 B/s 0.00 B/s 0.00 % 0.26 % [jbd2/dm-1-8] 05:55:10 16846 be/4 rmo 0.00 B/s 100.30 K/s 0.00 % 0.18 % firefox 05:55:10 14103 be/4 rmo 0.00 B/s 100.30 K/s 0.00 % 0.00 % firefox 05:55:13 394 be/3 root 0.00 B/s 0.00 B/s 0.00 % 0.28 % [jbd2/dm-1-8] 05:55:13 16846 be/4 rmo 0.00 B/s 88.24 K/s 0.00 % 0.12 % firefox</nowiki></pre> Virtually any action taken (especially closing a tab, any tab) causes the above. I moved ~/.mozilla and ~/.fonts to a tmpfs which once used to be enough to make the disk spin-ups reasonable but not any more. I changed the disk cache dirs browser.cache.disk.parent_directory → string → /tmp browser.cache.offline.parent_directory → string → /tmp to /tmp, which is also a tmpfs. Then I disabled disk cache browser.cache.disk.enable False browser.cache.memory.enable True but nothing seems to stop this crazy behaviour. What more can I do? I looked through lsof and strace, Firefox seems to also be using /var/cache/fontconfig/ and .cache/fontconfig/ do I need to move those, too? This is on Ubuntu 13.04 with Firefox 21.

Modified by cor-el

All Replies (1)

cokolwiek
cokolwiek Question owner
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OK. Moving ~/.cache to tmpfs brought an appreciable improvement. Apparently, disabling disk cache doesn't entirely disable disk cache.