Matti Robinson
28 Sep 2016 15:12
Modern web browsers offer amazing functionality, speed, and performance. One of the best features without question is the session recovery. This allows us to continue where we left of as if we never closed the browser, even in case of computer crashing. There is a definite drawback though.
Serve the Home's Sergei Bobik has noticed that especially Firefox likes to write excessive amounts of data on your drive in case recovery is needed. It can potentially amount to tens of gigabytes a day.
Also it not only eats your storage but slowly kills your SSD, if that is what you use. SSD's only allow certain amount of writes before they expire. Thus, having programs constantly writing on them is not good for their lifespan.
This seems to happen with Firefox even though it is not used. Bobik noticed that within 45 minutes of having Firefox open it had written over gigabyte of data to an SSD. At this pace tens of gigabytes per day can be accumulated. In his recent calculations the same problem seems to be in Chrome as well and it could backup restoration data more than 24 GB/day.
There's an easy fix to improve your SDD's lifespan and reduce storage used by Firefox. You can change the frequency of the data writeup, by default it is done every 15 seconds. Switch the browser.sessionstore.interval parameter by typing about:config in your Firefox address bar. Notice that the time is in milliseconds (15 000 = 15 seconds, 300 000 = 5 minutes).