How to stop Firefox from spinning up the disk?
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.
Modified by cor-el
All Replies (1)
OK. Moving ~/.cache to tmpfs brought an appreciable improvement. Apparently, disabling disk cache doesn't entirely disable disk cache.