Firefox sluggish on slow SSDs

[serola]

On netbooks with two SSDs you typically install / on fast and smaller drive and /home on slow but bigger drive. When Firefox browser get installed, ~/.mozilla become stored into /home. This is reported to slow down Firefox: http://www.marengo-ltd.com/blog/?p=65

The fix is to move ~/.mozilla from slow /home -drive to faster / -drive.

[Scott Evans (vk7hse)]

I would have thought that any customising (requesting to remove a default setting) should be left to the end user! as to predict individual hardware just would not work! ie. OS installed on internal SSD and /home onto a SD card. Anyway we shall see what the majority think !!! :)

[serola (sami-serola)]

You are absolutely right Scott :) So, maybe it is better not to try sniffing where end user actually put her/his /home and if that drive is fast or not. Especially because someone may have chanced their SSD into something else.

[Scott Evans (vk7hse)]

But lets hopefully get some more people involved to gauge a better view! it may just turn out that this is what more people want! :)

[mb74 (mrb74)]

If you have enough RAM you should copy the contents of .mozilla to a ramdisk and then mount it to .mozilla. Exactly this should do a script at startup. And on shutdown the script should copy back the contents to keep the changes. Please try the script attached and report any problems/success.
Just copy the script to /usr/local/bin and call it using sudo.
ffcache2mem.sh 1 activates caching to ram (need more than 50MB of RAM)
ffcache2mem.sh 0 copies the contents of ram back to the hd/ssd.
ffcache2mem.sh d drops the ramdisk.

[Jon Ramvi (ramvi)]

mb74's solution is good,
we should use ram as cache as default

[Jon Ramvi (ramvi)]

Changed Assigned to, to me, not Martin