A couple of weeks ago, I saw a post pop up on Twitter a few times about Firefox performing excessive writes to SSDs, which total up to 32GBs in a single day. The author attributes it mostly to a fast-updating session restore feature, although cookies were also resource hogs in their findings. In an update, they also tested Google Chrome, which, itself, clocked in over 24GB of writes in a day.
This, of course, seemed weird to me. I would have thought that at least one browser vendor might notice an issue like this. Still, I passed the link to Allyn because he would be much more capable in terms of being able to replicate these results. In our internal chat at the time, he was less skeptical than I was. I've since followed up with him, and he said that his initial results “wasn't nearly as bad as their case”. He'll apparently elaborate on tonight's podcast, and I'll update this post with his findings.
I have 1.67TB written on my
I have 1.67TB written on my 2-3 months old 850EVO – gaming and internet browsing
note: games are on the HDD
do you use shadowplay or
do you use shadowplay or amd’s similar 3rd party software? that could account for a bit of it.
not at all
I calculated a
not at all
I calculated a average of 18GB per day written over 91 days of use
What OS? Hopefully Mozilla
What OS? Hopefully Mozilla and Google will look at their source code and nail down a fix.
W10 PRO x64
W10 PRO x64
Yeah, I saw that article and
Yeah, I saw that article and it’s not that scary, but probably not too out fetched either. I swapped my 840 Pro for Sandisk Extreme Pro 14 month ago. So far I have 14TB host writes. So that’s roughly 1TB per month and thus 33GB per day.
I run BOINC most of time, and it would burn quite a lot (at least 10GB/day. I used to see projects burning 100GB/day). I don’t have Firefox open all the time. Roughly only 6 hours per day I would say. So having it writing 1GB per hour seems to be pretty possible.
I won’t say it’s excessive though. Unless you have a 60GB SSD, at this rate, one will swap for a new one before it dies, so who cares…
Looking forward to seeing the replicated results.
People who dont like the
People who dont like the excessive wear to come from incompetent programming.
From what I’ve been reading,
From what I’ve been reading, this excessive behavior may be due to the scripts running in all those tabs, and folks using stuff like uBlock and noscript are seeing similar usage.
This makes me wonder, if there’s a way to make a tab “frozen in time” while not in active use, with an option to allow the tab to run in the background (for music streaming or uploading tasks, for example) so that only the active tab will be triggering session restore saves.
Till then, we’ll just have to wait till FF restructures their session restore architecture, which they say they are aware of, and will do when they can, but will be careful, so they don’t pull a Microsoft Patch stunt, or “kill the kernel” FUBAR, as happens when changes are pressed too quickly…
Oops. I meant “folks using
Oops. I meant “folks using stuff like uBlock and noscript are NOT seeing similar usage.”
“frozen tabs” is an option
“frozen tabs” is an option for some browsers as an addon already.
It’s the ad spaffers, and
It’s the ad spaffers, and this wastes power and wears out SSDs. It’s time to regulate video ad content and force the browsers to only accept single image ads with scripting disabled to save on power usage, SSD wear, and user data caps! HTML5/newer standards need to have specialized ad wrapper tags where the ads must be defined and the browsers need to have top level settings to not allow ad video buffering/loading and only allow single image ads that are script restricted to only use the minimal power/resources on users PC/Laptop/tablets/phones.
Any tabs(processes) that do not have focus should be frozen(With minimal system resources used while frozen) with each Tab given a Run in the background button that the user can click to allow the web page/Tab to run in the background. All this excessive browser activity needs to be fixed, and browser makers required to use the minimal of energy/system resources.
Talk about power uasge/power saving requlations like energy star! The online ad indistry wastes gigawatts of the PC/Laptop/mobile devices power and exabytes of user data allotments. What a ripoff!
http://news.softpedia.com/new
http://news.softpedia.com/news/adjust-this-setting-before-firefox-wears-off-your-ssd-drive-508665.shtml
“Chrome seems to generate the same operations as well”
Seriously, WHO THE HELL CARES
Seriously, WHO THE HELL CARES IF IT DOES? Modern SSDs have proven several times over that they’re exceptionally reliable sheer data retention-wise and very sturdy when it comes down to bytes-per-day written cicles. You’d completely change your entire PC build before you’ll ever wear out to the complete death something like Plextor’s M5S, for example (not even mentioning such beasts as Samsung’s 950 series). “STOP WHINING!” (c) Arnold Schwarzenegger
No doubt it’s the cache
No doubt it’s the cache folder(s) causing the heavy usage. You can check the size of Chrome’s cache in the following location for Windows PCs: C:Users-yourID-AppDataLocalGoogleChromeUser DataDefault, the two biggest folders in there are: “Cache” & “Media Cache”. You would probably have to dig into the configuration of chrome to change where it stores userdata to move it to an older hard drive. I have not had any issues with any of my systems using the SSD for that cache, but I would prefer an option to have the browser use RAM for caching media, I don’t care about faster reloads of sites in fact I would prefer they load fresh every visit.
To the stop whining crowd:
To the stop whining crowd: Mobile devices with soldered in flash beg to differ. Especially low end mobile, with cheap and nasty flash chips. When the 7 dollar flash chip burns out in a 300 dollar phone/tablet, your repair quotes are 450 for repair. Consider what that means. This is why adults who buy things with their own money might care, and 12 year old gamers might not.
Additionally lots of other software, and even drivers do this. Ups, and printer drivers are among the worst.
I recently installed an SDD
I recently installed an SDD in my desktop. Everything was fine for a few days then whenever I was in Chrome my system would freeze with a solid red harddrive activity light. I couldn’t do anything; a cold reset was the only way to solve it. I did walk away one time and the activity stopped after about 20 to 30 minutes and the system was usable again.
I completely cloned my OS so I have both available on my system. The old system with exactly the same OS doesn’t do this.
I saw the article about Firefox eating SSD’s and followed their instructions on how to remedy that situation. It worked. The problem with Chrome is that you cannot resolve it because there is no equivalent solution. I’ve had to stop using Chrome altogether. I don’t like it when your mouse and keyboard are useless for a half and hour because of you browser.
Until Google resolves the SSD eating problem I will not use it again.
It sucks; but I can’t afford to have Chrome destroying my SSD.
HELLLLOOOOO GOOOOOGLE ARE YOU LISTENING?