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I'm wondering if there is a way to disable all browsing-related drive access (history, cookie jar, disk caches) in either Firefox or Google Chromium (Linux).
Basically, I'm running this on a laptop, with wads of RAM, but often enough in an environment that triggers drive head protection - working from cars, working in industrial settings, etc. The continuous spin-up just to take note that I opened another tab.. is both time consuming and annoying (why is it synchronous with my activities in the first place?).
Before I go nuclear on the project and just dump .firefox / .cache on their own tiny ramdisk, any ideas? I think ChromeOS-based laptops do it somehow, but how?
qdot
Posted 2012-02-18T02:59:26.077
Reputation: 696
1You could just get an SSD for your laptop, it'd solve a bunch of problems you'd have with using it in those situations. It's pretty hard to make the OS itself not use any disk at all. – Wuffers – 2012-02-18T03:50:24.640
Given that I have it nailed down to the only app that actually writes to disk without a direct request.. Getting SSD through our regulatory needs? forget it, at least until degaussers catch up (or someone figures out that perhaps a big shredder is good enough) (Basically I haven't seen an SSD that properly supports secure erase unit) – qdot – 2012-02-18T03:59:25.863
1gobs of ram, browser temps stuff ? ramdisk that you mention would be perfect. just redirect all the net folders to it. any kind of flash chunk could have the net stuff sent to it, if there is a way in the laptop to stuff in some sort of flash chunk (like PCMIA) or slots for it, without it sticking out ready to be broken off. – Psycogeek – 2012-02-18T04:09:32.310
yeah, the ramdisk option is probably optimal - just fishing for information whether browsers can be coerced to behave in a more sane manner (what about old-fashioned 'save session on exit, and don't bother writing in the meantime'?) This is also probably quite critical for HOME on NFS deployments etc. – qdot – 2012-02-18T05:03:27.077
Try Firefox Portable with a ramdisk. You can then have a super-fast Firefox installation. The only thing is, you'll need to setup two batch files: one to create the ramdisk, copy FF Portable to it and run FF, two to copy out the FF Portable to hard disk (or sync it with DSynchronize; faster and better) and destroy the ramdisk. – ADTC – 2012-02-18T12:30:08.650
Do you happen to know how does FF portable do it? I'm on linux, so I don't care that much about loading times - the OS does a splendid job prefetching and keeping stuff in RAM, and there is no FF portable for linux. One day I toyed around with sticking the entire OS in a compressed ramdisk, but I do development and sometimes need to change the OS itself. – qdot – 2012-02-18T17:08:20.947
Firefox Portable is for Windows. – iglvzx – 2012-02-19T00:43:19.370
Oh sorry, Firefox Portable (for Windows) can run in Linux under Wine. But if that's not what you want (instead, you wanna run the native Firefox) it can't help you. "Do you happen to know how does FF portable do it?" Firefox portable doesn't load itself into a ramdisk, if that's what you're asking. I was trying to tell you a way you can do that manually. PS: I'll look for ways to make native Linux Firefox portable. – ADTC – 2012-02-19T02:34:33.270
Yeah, I could put Firefox Portable on a ramdisk (just returned from another of those annoying trips) - but I just went with mountbinding .firefox .cache and .mozilla into a ramdisk, prepopulated on boot - this solved that issue. – qdot – 2012-09-24T19:07:50.510