Avatar for Username

Search Support

Avoid support scams. We will never ask you to call or text a phone number or share personal information. Please report suspicious activity using the “Report Abuse” option.

Learn More

Este fío arquivouse. Faga unha nova pregunta se precisa axuda.

How to stop Firefox from spinning up the disk?

  • 1 resposta
  • 1 has this problem
  • 1 view
  • Last reply by cokolwiek

cokolwiek
cokolwiek
more options

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.

cor-el modificouno o

All Replies (1)

cokolwiek
cokolwiek Question owner
more options

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