HOWTO: Prevent Firefox from fsync'ing to disk.

[sdennie]

The syncing described here is caused by the way firefox uses sqlite and the fact that it writes to places.sqlite after every page loads (and that causes an fsync). Turning off the browser cache isn't a great idea but shouldn't cause any problems. Redirecting it to a tmpfs is a great idea though.

[ibuclaw]

The syncing described here is caused by the way firefox uses sqlite and the fact that it writes to places.sqlite after every page loads (and that causes an fsync). Turning off the browser cache isn't a great idea but shouldn't cause any problems. Redirecting it to a tmpfs is a great idea though.

It is an especially great idea if you know what you are doing and get the crons that copy the data back to harddrive setup correctly. (Else, you are loosing all saved data every time you shutdown).

[rblyngso]

Thanks a lot! Running Ubuntu/firefox on my Aspire One with SSD was slow (to put it mildly) before applying this hack.

Another way of applying the hack:

I put the fsync.so in /opt/mozilla/lib/ and created the following /usr/local/bin/firefox (with executable bit set):

 #!/bin/sh

export LD_PRELOAD=/opt/mozilla/lib/fsync.so
/usr/bin/firefox "$@"

Regards,
Regnar

[ibuclaw]

Thanks a lot! Running Ubuntu/firefox on my Aspire One with SSD was slow (to put it mildly) before applying this hack.

Another way of applying the hack:

I put the fsync.so in /opt/mozilla/lib/ and created the following /usr/local/bin/firefox (with executable bit set):

 #!/bin/sh

export LD_PRELOAD=/opt/mozilla/lib/fsync.so
/usr/bin/firefox "$@"

Regards,
Regnar

May I just note that since the release of Firefox 3.5, this problem has been none existent.

So the best solution for everyone in the end is to upgrade to Karmic Koala when the Official Release comes through in October.

Regards
Iain

[DLGandalf]

ehh, I'm experiencing this under karmic and lucid.