Firefox Stutter / Lag - SSD Light on

Anyone else having issues with firefox stuttering/lagging? When doing so, the SSD HD light is always on, and the system is fine again when it goes off.

I tried reducing the cache to 0MB, but that doesn't seem to have helped.

Oh, in addition, I do have the fast SSD, but only 512mb of ram.

 

It's not an easy problem to solve, you can read this for a start.

 

That appears to be related to linpus, afaik ubuntu does not use yum.
Please correct me if i'm wrong.

 

I run the 'disk' cache on a ramdisk (I have 1.5GB mem)

 

Try disabling malware and phishing protection off (about:config) if using FF3. I can't remember the exact settings string names, so may be do a serach on google for the exact strings, should be very easy to find.

 

I was running Intrepid on the AA1 on a external usb drive. Yesterday I decided to install on the SSD, and now firefox is atrociously slow. I've tried the usual stuff - pointing the cache to /tmp (mounted as tmpfs), disabling phishing and malware detection, etc. Still no luck, it just hangs 2-3 seconds at a time, with the ssd light on, almost every minute. This didn't happen on the external usb hdd, so I assume it is sdd related.
Any other ideas? I have /tmp, /var/log, and /var/tmp as tmpfs:

Code:

tmpfs      /var/log/apt    tmpfs        defaults,noatime           0    0
tmpfs      /var/log        tmpfs        defaults,noatime           0    0
tmpfs      /tmp            tmpfs        defaults,noatime,mode=1777           0    0
tmpfs      /var/tmp        tmpfs        defaults,noatime           0    0

My 1.5GB ram isn't full:

Code:

free
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:       1544404    1066204     478200          0     265372     332640
-/+ buffers/cache:     468192    1076212
Swap:            0          0          0

I have swap disabled to reduce wear and tear on the ssd and to try to improve speed. Now, what else can I do to have firefox responding as it did on hdd?

 

That's true but the other things still apply.

 

I had the same problems and tried a bunch of tips without success, so I simply installed FF2 instead.

 

i did have the same problem, with Fx 3 or Fx 2...

the only good way to resolve this bug is to use Opera... If someone finds any other way to solve this, please share

 

I did the following steps to get my Firefox 3 to work smoothly.

Go to Ff's cong by typing about:config on the address bar

set network.prefetch-next to false
set browser.cache.disk.capacity to 0
set browser.cache.disk.enable to false
set browser.cache.offline.capacity to 0
set browser.cache.offline.enable to false

Make sure browser.cache.memory.enable is set to true.

When you've made all those fixes, Ff's disk usage is minimal and it almost never accesses the SSD. Browser cache is in the memory (as in RAM) and it does not use disk cache (SSD) at all. Disabling the network.prefetch will decrease Ff's bandwidth usage and makes the browser only load the links you actually click.

And on a sidenote, I'm using Xubuntu, not the stock Linpus, so I can't say if those modifications will affect Linpus or will they be reversed on next update or something.

 

I did that, and the responsiveness is much improved. Infortunately, I still have lots of frequent SSD accesses (1 every 4-5 seconds). I removed update-motd and everything landscape related, and things improved a lot, but are still not perfect. When writing something, I have to disable the dictionary and even then it lags and lags.

 

I only see one solution.... OPERA is very, very fast

 

I have no lag at all, see the link i posted. It's a bit tedious to set up but ultimately worth it. Try shrinking the sqlite files first.

 

Shirinking the sqlite files helped a little, but there is still a lag.

The link you posted is for linpus, not for ubuntu. Ubuntu doesn't use yum, so doesn't have the conflict problems with sqlite.
I am using your dmesg loop to try to understand what is going on with the disk writes, and it seems it is firefox, doing writes.

 

And after three days, it seems that shrinking the sqlite databases does indeed fix most of the lag, it is still present but now it is in the order of the 10ths of a second, instead of the 4-5 seconds I had before. What I did, copied from macles blog, is the following:

Code:

sudo -s
find $HOME -name \*sqlite -exec sqlite3 {} 'VACUUM;' \;

 

I couldn't get the sqlite shrinking to work, errors ranging from access denied, to being unable to locate files.
Tried running in various forms of sudo -s, sudo, etc.

Anyways, Reducing your history keep time to only a few days, and turning off the two "remember" options seems to help a little bit. Still problems, but slightly reduced delays.

 

Did you try copy/paste directly the two lines I posted above? That worked for me.

 

I get the following response from direct copying

chris@AspireOne:~$ sudo -s
[sudo] password for chris:
root@AspireOne:~# find $HOME -name \*sqlite -exec sqlite3 {} 'VACUUM;' \;
find: /home/chris/.gvfs: Permission denied

I made sure to close firefox before executing this command.

 

I don't have any .gvfs dir, maybe because I am running KDE 4.1 and it probably is created by gnome, but I don't think that dir would have any of the firefox sqlite databases. To make sure they are being found and optimized, you could use this command instead:

Code:

find $HOME -name \*sqlite -print -exec sqlite3 {} 'VACUUM;' \;

Notice the extra "-print", it will show you which databases it found and optimized.

 

That worked, thanks