Comentarii pentru: Speed up Firefox by mounting the profile in tmpfs [Linux only]

de: [Linux] Firefox performance tip « In Arid Glamor (IceHot)

[Linux] Firefox performance tip « In Arid Glamor (IceHot) — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 21:04:50 +0000

[...] you are looking for the best way to speed up Firefox, see how to mount the profile in tmpfs (RAM backend [...]

de: HowtoMatrix » Speed up Firefox by mounting the profile in tmpfs [Linux only]

Tue, 06 Jan 2009 13:29:45 +0000

[...] Read more at icehot.wordpress.com [...]

de: Speed Up Firefox (Linux Only)

Speed Up Firefox (Linux Only) — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 11:25:11 +0000

[...] .wp-polls .pollbar { margin: 1px; font-size: 6px; line-height: 8px; height: 8px; background-image: url(‘http://www.favbrowser.com/wp-content/plugins/wp-polls/images/default/pollbg.gif’); border: 1px solid #c8c8c8; } .recentcomments a{display:inline !important;padding: 0 !important;margin: 0 !important;} News FeedCommentsHomeArchivesContact UsSuggest an ArticleDonateBrowse > Home / Firefox, Tips / Speed Up Firefox (Linux Only) Speed Up Firefox (Linux Only)Written by Vygantas Lipskas on January 6, 2009Here is another tip for Linux users only by Andrei. [...]

de: Cypress

Cypress — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 20:07:44 +0000

Wow. Nice. Tre’ sa-i dau o incercare zilele urmatoare.

de: iggykoopa

iggykoopa — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 17:13:23 +0000

the powersaving gui I’m working on has something similar to this. It copies your firefox folder to a backup and /dev/shm then symlinks the old folder to the copy in /dev/shm, then it uses rsync every five minutes to sync the backup. If you want to check it out instructions are here http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=988309 .(I included it in the gui because it also helps keep your disk spun down, firefox is horrible with disk writes)

de: Andrei

Andrei — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 23:15:52 +0000

ok… that i do not know, but here is what i found:

Firefox 3 is a significant stride forward in features, but it carries with it an equally significant stride backward in performance. The stats are much better – better memory usage both at startup and over time, faster JavaScript execution, less CPU time – but the browser just felt sluggish, even when it shouldn’t. Thought that your system with a terabyte of RAM and 256 cores could make Firefox soar? It turns out that, for most users, Firefox is actually I/O-bound, in large part because of the switch to SQLite databases.

SQLite is designed to be portable and highly reliable, and it pulls this off with amazing success. However, it does this at the cost of speed. SQLite implements its own journaling system, lock contention procedures, multi-process access, and more. Since SQLite is a portable library, the only way to pull these complex feats off is through standard file I/O. As the volume of data that Firefox stores in SQLite databases grow – and as the number of tabs concurrently trying to access those databases on your system do as well – the time spent by Firefox on secure, hardware-backed I/O grows as well. And since SQLite is so cautious about synchronization, even gobs of RAM and a fast CPU can’t help; the process becomes entirely I/O-bound, particularly at the moments where it should be the most responsive (typing a URL, opening or switching tabs, and the like).

But how attached are you to the last five minutes of your browsing history, really? SQLite’s agonizingly slow access times can destroy performance – and, because of the high volume of writes, it can also destroy sectors on SSDs, USB drives, or other flash media if your profile is on one of these devices. To me, it’s worth accepting a little volatility in the event of a crash for a noticeable and welcome increase in responsiveness.

it seems the SQLite is the main issue for speed and i don’t think it would make any difference using the HDD, but you can try…

de: Delta

Delta — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 21:22:43 +0000

Ah, I got you. How would the browser’s speed compare if you were to mount your FF profile as a loopback FS (to save RAM)? I know it wouldn’t be AS fast as tmpfs, since the file would still be mounted on your HDD, but would its speed be noticeably improved?

de: Andrei

Andrei — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 20:50:36 +0000

If you do everything as above, there is a backup made every 5 minutes in home/.mozilla/firefox called packed.tar. That backup is also used to populate your Firefox profile folder after each restart (since ram is cleared after shutdown/restart).

Oh, and also the old packed.tar is saved: packed.tar.old

de: Delta

Delta — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 20:43:26 +0000

This is a great article; I have one question, though: what happens if you have some sort of power failure after mounting your FF profile as tmpfs? Seeing as it is mounted in RAM, would you not lose a lot of information?