Is there a performance gain for running a web browser and/or swap from SSD?

0

What's the bird's eye view of running a specific application from an SSD for improved i/o in comparison to a standard hard drive?

Would this help with browser speed?

The list of applications which could benefit from faster storage is vast.[3]

and

As part of their designs, SSDs offer much bigger levels of parallelism for I/O operations, so it is preferable to leave scheduling decisions to their internal logic – especially for high-end SSDs.[188][189]

Or, perhaps, just swap and temporary files? Withough getting too deep into the nitty-gritty is this feasible and what might the extent of performance gain be?

Thufir

Posted 2019-01-07T06:49:00.583

Reputation: 876

While it's true that they offer objectively better performance than your typical 7.2k HDD (due to not having any seek latency for a start), I think how much better it is can vary a lot between systems (and be partly perceptual). If you want benchmarks, various review sites already have plenty of those. – user1686 – 2019-01-07T06:59:42.053

2SSDs are generally very much faster than HDDs - they don't need to seek, and they read and write much faster. So anything which does a lot of disk access (such as a database server which has too much data to store all of it in memory) will benefit massively from being on an SSD. But you already know that. I don't see how we can provide you with a more bird's eye view than that. – l0b0 – 2019-01-07T07:00:26.483

Not overly concerned about database server performance so much as browser performance as per the title. Seems sufficiently specific, but, of course, I'm biased. – Thufir – 2019-01-07T07:06:22.083

2It depends a lot on the amount of RAM you already have, since Linux caches files in memory. And the browser performance is rather dependent on the global performance of the network stack. – xenoid – 2019-01-07T08:01:06.847

Answers

1

For swap Absolutely-the difference is night and day. SWAP is disk trying to be memory, only it sucks because it has low IOPS and liw random speeds. SSD has characteristics which closely map RAM speeds. Infact, Intel recently released a fancy SSD called Optane which they did not brand as an SSD, rather they marketed it as cache - ie something to act as high speed swap.

The gains you get will vary, but between 10 and 5000 times gain over swap on HDD depending on fragmentation -100times faster is entirely realistic.

Web browsing tends to cache files and likewise can benefit A LOT from SSD - not in the same magnitude as swap though because less if it's time doing disk IO.

davidgo

Posted 2019-01-07T06:49:00.583

Reputation: 49 152

Asked: 2019-01-07T06:49:00.583

Viewed: 43 times

Active: 2019-01-07T07:12:33.103