1305193 - Firefox excessively writes "recovery.js" to SSDs every 15 seconds, killing SSD lifespan.

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1304389

(Core :: Networking: Cache, defect)

Description

[arnfranke]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:49.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/49.0
Build ID: 20160920074044

Steps to reproduce:

View the SSD I/O disk utilization of Firefox in Resource Monitor as stated in this guide: https://www.servethehome.com/firefox-is-eating-your-ssd-here-is-how-to-fix-it/ Further discussion is at this Reddit thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/545rx2/is_anybody_using_firefox_and_has_his_home/


Actual results:

Firefox excessively writes the file "recovery.js" to SSDs every 15 seconds. This can result in 10+ GB of disk writes per day, which vastly lowers SSD lifespan. Further details: https://www.servethehome.com/firefox-is-eating-your-ssd-here-is-how-to-fix-it/


Expected results:

Firefox would ideally automatically detect SSDs and set the "browser.sessionstore.interval" to a disabled value (such as -1 or 0), a high number such as 2 billion, or some other method of disabling writing to the "recovery.js" file.

It has been observed by the author of the linked guide that by changing this value, Firefox only seems to write about 1 GB to the disk per day, which is acceptable.

Comment 1

[arnfranke]

Another solution would be to change the value "browser.sessionstore.resume_from_crash" to false when an SSD is detected.