Firefox writing 50GB per day?

Operating Systems & Open Source Open Source & Web-Based
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I was setting up drive statistic monitoring, and realized that I had 10TB of writes to my 2TB ssd since setting it up about two months ago. After some digging, I realized that firefox is writing 50GB of data per day in session & cookie storage. level1techs cookies alone were written 50,000 times in a 24 hour period, when I only had it open in the background. This seems absurd!

Has anyone noticed this or know of a way to fix this? googling I see people mentioning various adblock plugins, but I can’t seem to find a solution

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https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Firefox/Profile_on_RAM
Some search suggests this may be relevant to your use-case, in particular removing disk caching, or relocating it to a ramdisk.
Archwiki is for Archlinux, but Firefox is Firefox.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Firefox/Tweaks#Longer_interval_between_session_information_record
This may also be useful.

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Nice this is very useful, firefox can destroy my storage device

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i have over 3k tab open and it barely write. erase the install and install a fresh ff. Or you system have problem with swap or you do run under 16g of ram.

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The session about:config didn’t change much, so I just enabled profile-sync-daemon, lets see how that goes.

@Docopo This is actually a fresh debian 12 with a saved ~/ dir, so the install is fresh. Definitely not a swap issue, as I have no swap and 256GB of ram

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What are you using to monitor writes?

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Good question! I periodically scrape the SMART statistics. I love the fact that smartctl supports JSON output via -j

Then to find the cause, I use fatrace

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Just throwing things at the wall, but there happened to be a post in the Nix discourse just today talking about something similar which brought up a possibly relevant point: Create ramdisk on stratup and move .cache folder on it - #3 by gosup7 - Help - NixOS Discourse

Have you looked at if having the browser with no tabs/extensions behaves better than under normal use? Certain websites or extensions behaving badly could explain why there’s a “50gb per day” vs “works on my machine :)” sort of difference here.

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Funny thing is, this seem to be going on for a loong time:

Third one is recent recap, so its most useful as starting point.

Also you are not alone:

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image1855Ă—725 130 KB

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Weirdly I must be cursed. I have two profiles:

Testing profile. Permanent incognito, few extensions. Writes 20GB/day if I leave it open
Normal profile. More extensions, ~1000 tabs, writes 50GB/day

The most active extensions in the write log are adblock and friends

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