Stop Firefox spinning up the hdd all the time in laptop-mode

OK, this should work in any Ubuntu laptop system, but I was motivated to find it on my hdd-equipped Aspire One running Intrepid, so I thought I'd post it up.

This only applies to hdd-equipped Aspire Ones. Ignore if you have an ssd model.

The problem is that you want (well, I want) it to spin down the hard drive when I'm not doing something that ought to need it. The first step is to enable laptop mode. To do this, edit /etc/default/acpi-support:

Code:

gksu gedit /etc/default/acpi-support

Find the line with "ENABLE_LAPTOP_MODE=false" and change the "false" to "true". Uncomment the line if it's commented. (I can't remember if it is by default.)

Start laptop-mode to get the benefit straight away. It'll start automatically on your next reboot anyway.

Code:

/etc/init.d/laptop-mode restart

Now, when you're on battery, the hard drive will spin down quite rapidly after any hard drive access. Great.

Now try to use Firefox. You'll find that it spins up the hard drive every time you hit a page. Once all the other excuses are dealt with (eg: all fonts are cached, all caching is turned off or redirected to a ramdisk, it's still doing it. In fact, the only apparent way to stop it is to turn off history. But history is useful, so that's a bad move.

The problem is that every time you hit a page it writes what you've done to the history file. That would be fine except in Firefox 3.0 that history file is an sqlite file, and after every write it forces a filesystem sync.

My solution is to stick the whole of your mozilla settings folder into a ramdisk and run it from there. It has the additional benefit of speeding things up but that's really secondary from my point of view: I just wanted it to stop spinning up the drive all the time.

Like this:

First, set up /tmp to run in a ramdisk just like you would if running on an ssd-equipped AA1. So append these lines to your /etc/fstab:

Code:

tmpfs      /var/log        tmpfs        defaults           0    0
tmpfs      /tmp            tmpfs        defaults           0    0
tmpfs      /var/tmp        tmpfs        defaults           0    0

Add any other steps required for this to work as detailed in the Ubuntu AspireOne howto. Reboot. (Don't just 'mount -a' and expect things to carry on working right.)

(You can make any new location for this instead of using /tmp, but I'm using these just like I would in an ssd-equipped Aspire One basically to also cut down on hdd usage and thus have it spin up less often.)

Quit firefox if it's running. You're about to take its world away, it won't be happy if you don't quit it.

Code:

mv ~/.mozilla/firefox ~/.mozilla/firefox.real
ln -s /tmp/$LOGNAME/firefox.real firefox

Yes, that symlink will be broken when you create it. What we're now going to do is make sure the target is there each time you log in:

Create a file /etc/gdm/PostLogin/Default:

Code:

gksu gedit /etc/gdm/PostLogin/Default

And put this in it:

Code:

mkdir -p /tmp/$LOGNAME

if [ ! -d /tmp/$LOGNAME/firefox.real ] ; then
	rsync -a $HOME/.mozilla/firefox.real /tmp/$LOGNAME/
fi

Make sure the file is executable:

Code:

chmod a+x /etc/gdm/PostLogin/Default

Log out. Next time you log in, it will copy your ~/.mozilla/firefox.real folder into the ramdisk, unless it's there already.

Now you can start firefox, and it will run with all its settings in ram.

Finally, you want the changes to your firefox state to be saved back to your hard drive, so you actually get to keep the new history/bookmarks/passwords et-al you make.

I don't have a perfect solution here; the one I have is sufficient for my purposes. It is possible that you will lose data - up to the last fifteen minutes of changed firefox state - if the machine crashes or loses power. I just decided this is less important than solving the hard drive spin-up problem.

Put the following into a script. It doesn't matter where, as we'll be using the complete path to that script later, but I have it in my user's bin folder:

Code:

mkdir -p ~/Library/bin
gedit ~/Library/bin/firefox-fromram

firefox-fromram:

Code:

#!/bin/bash

if [ -d /tmp/$LOGNAME/firefox.real ] ; then
	rsync -a /tmp/$LOGNAME/firefox.real $HOME/.mozilla/
fi

Now we want to run this every fifteen minutes. (You can alter the interval but you'll need to read up on how crontab works some more.)

Code:

crontab -e

Add the line:

Code:

0-59/15 *       *       *       *       $HOME/Library/bin/firefox-fromram

Save and exit, and you're done. (No restart or logout/login needed to get that working). Now, every fifteen minutes, it will sync the firefox folder in ramdisk back to your hard drive.

It could be made more foolproof, and more automatically-set-up for the first use, but I got it working for me and, with a nasty cold, felt I'd done enough.

 

Interesting. I suppose you could set up a script that you would use to poweroff that would sync up with .mozilla in ram before actually bringing down the system

 

Sure. It's "good enough" for me now though, so I'm too lazy to do it.