If you're a Firefox user, you may find this to be of interest.
Purely by chance, I fired up a free copy of SSDLife on two consecutive days where I haven't really used my workstation for anything other than email and browsing. For those of you unfamiliar with this tool, it simply reports estimated lifetime for the attached SSD and it also shows the amount of data read and written.
In my case, SSDLife notified me that 12GB was written to the SSD in one day. Since I didn't recall downloading any huge files over the previous day or visiting any new sites that could've resulted in bringing down a lot of new content to the cache, this puzzled me. I monitored these stats over the next couple of weeks and this behavior stayed consistent. Even if the workstation was left idle with nothing running on it but a few browser windows, it would invariably write at least 10GB per day to the SSD.
To find out what's going on, I fired up Resource Monitor and looked at disk utilization.
At the very top of the list was Firefox, writing tirelessly at anywhere between 300K and 2MB per second to a file called "recovery.js". Googling around revealed that this is Firefox's session backup file that is used to restore your browser sessions in case of a browser or an OS crash. I was aware of the fact that Firefox had this feature, but I had no idea that session information was so heavy!
After some digging, I found out that this behavior is controlled by a parameter that you can access through "about:config" -- browser.sessionstore.interval
It is set to 15 seconds by default. In my case, I reset it to a more sane (at least for me) 30 minutes. Since then, I'm only seeing about 2GB written to disk when my workstation is left idle, which still feels like a lot but is 5 times less than before.
Bottom line is that if you have consumer level SSDs in some of your machines, you may want to check and tweak your Firefox config. Those things are usually rated for about 20GB of writes per day and Firefox alone might be using more than half of that, especially if you're like me and have a few browser windows open at all times each with numerous tabs. Changing this parameter may even help with normal HDDs. Your machine will feel faster if it doesn't have to constantly write this session info.
Purely by chance, I fired up a free copy of SSDLife on two consecutive days where I haven't really used my workstation for anything other than email and browsing. For those of you unfamiliar with this tool, it simply reports estimated lifetime for the attached SSD and it also shows the amount of data read and written.
In my case, SSDLife notified me that 12GB was written to the SSD in one day. Since I didn't recall downloading any huge files over the previous day or visiting any new sites that could've resulted in bringing down a lot of new content to the cache, this puzzled me. I monitored these stats over the next couple of weeks and this behavior stayed consistent. Even if the workstation was left idle with nothing running on it but a few browser windows, it would invariably write at least 10GB per day to the SSD.
To find out what's going on, I fired up Resource Monitor and looked at disk utilization.
At the very top of the list was Firefox, writing tirelessly at anywhere between 300K and 2MB per second to a file called "recovery.js". Googling around revealed that this is Firefox's session backup file that is used to restore your browser sessions in case of a browser or an OS crash. I was aware of the fact that Firefox had this feature, but I had no idea that session information was so heavy!
After some digging, I found out that this behavior is controlled by a parameter that you can access through "about:config" -- browser.sessionstore.interval
It is set to 15 seconds by default. In my case, I reset it to a more sane (at least for me) 30 minutes. Since then, I'm only seeing about 2GB written to disk when my workstation is left idle, which still feels like a lot but is 5 times less than before.
Bottom line is that if you have consumer level SSDs in some of your machines, you may want to check and tweak your Firefox config. Those things are usually rated for about 20GB of writes per day and Firefox alone might be using more than half of that, especially if you're like me and have a few browser windows open at all times each with numerous tabs. Changing this parameter may even help with normal HDDs. Your machine will feel faster if it doesn't have to constantly write this session info.
