Firefox & tmpfs

Gilles Gravier ggravier at fsfe.org
Tue Jan 11 15:07:05 UTC 2011


Hi!

On 11/01/2011 15:30, Chris G wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 11, 2011 at 12:56:51PM +0000, Jacob Mansfield wrote:
>> On 11 January 2011 07:28, Gilles Gravier <ggravier at fsfe.org> wrote:
>>>> Performance. :)
>>> Old versions of Firefox you could easily configure the size of RAM cache
>>> as well as file system cache... On modern versions I can only see a
>>> setting for "Cache" which is the filesystem one.
>>>
>>> If you put the cache in a tmpfs, that is, in fact, RAM (which is why it
>>> gets deleted at each reboot).
>>>
>>> If you have plenty of RAM (and Sandy has 8 gigs, plenty for doing only
>>> open office and firefox on a single user desktop) then allocating a gig
>>> or so to tmpfs and putting firefox cache in there is a great way to
>>> increase firefox caching performance by orders of magnitude.
>>>
> There's no point is there, the disk data will be cached in RAM anyway so
> using tmpfs makes no difference
Actually, it does. Disk caching algorithms aren't the same as pure
tmpfs. And after some time, you still have to write to the disk, which
you completely avoid with tmpfs... It's easier to symlink your Mozilla
cache directory than to tweak your filesystem caching parameters...

Gilles.




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