Write traffic through Firefox's and Chromes "store session functionality"

Question

As some of you may have already noticed there was figured out that the massive write traffic up to well above 20GB/day generated by Firefox and Chrome web browsers through their "store session" functionality may harm consumer rated SSDs not set up for such heavy writing access.

Where is quite easy to fix (or at least workaround) in Firefox, I struggle to find a solution for Chrome to avoid said traffic (don't need session storage tbh).

In Firefox you just have to edit the browser.sessionstore.interval value in your config to a value other, preferably higher, than 15000ms (15s), eg. 1800000ms (equal to 30mins) which will cut traffic significantly.

Problem is I couldn't find a similar value in Chrome. Any suggestions for a quick fix, don't want my new laptops SSD to get shred by Chromes Session Storage.

Thank you

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Check here for further information: https://www.servethehome.com/firefox-is-eating-your-ssd-here-is-how-to-fix-it/

Answer 1

I've sort of found a solution for Chrome.

You can use the add-on - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great-suspender/klbibkeccnjlkjkiokjodocebajanakg/related

This unloads tabs that have been inactive for a set period of time while retaining the favicon and the tab description. While a tab is unloaded it does not generate the I/O activity visible in perfmon.

Some additional information that may be of interest is that this I/O operation may not be as detrimental as many think. I/O read/write bytes is what is showing high usage which in this case means that the Network I/O is high not disk or peripheral. I have not been able to determine exactly how network I/O impacts real disk writes, but here is what I believe is happening.

I/O does not mean a disk write, it means that data from a network receiver is instructed for write. So for example, If I have 20 tabs open which generates 1GB/hr of network traffic, that is the data that is looking to be written, if it already exists, it is not re-written. Network I/O does not know if data already exists on disk. If you look at the "Disk Write/Read Bytes" in perfmon you will see that the actual data read and written is far less that what passes through the Network I/O which corroborates my theory.

Here's is a thread with information and links that helped formulate my conclusion: https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/firefox-is-chewing-through-your-nand.11346/page-4

I'm still not 100% sure if my thoughts are correct but if they aren't, the extension that I linked does fix the issue of high Network I/O. I would love to have something with more knowledge share.