Speeding up Firefox 3 on the Eee
I’m running ubuntu-eee on my new Asus Eee 901. And Firefox 3.0 was horrible on it. You’d load a page, and scrolling up and down would pause frequently with a jittery, jerky motion. It was so annoying that I experimented with Opera and Epiphany as replacements. Both fine browsers, but I hated being without add-ins like Adblock Plus and Foxmarks. Read on to find out how to fix it…
So how to fix it?
The Eee comes with two SSD drives – the 4GB system drive and the other SSD (in my case I ordered the 16GB one). The secondary SSD is much slower than the system SSD.
Typically (as in my case) when installing Linux, you’d mount root (/) on the 4GB system SSD, and /home on the bigger (but slower) SSD.
Firefox’s settings directory is stored under ~/.mozilla. It writes a lot of stuff there – caches, phishing checks, offline storage etc. And apparently Firefox 3 does a lot more of this than before. So the obvious solution, given this information, is to move your ~/.mozilla directory onto the faster system SSD. Here’s how I did it:
sudo mkdir /usr/share/my_stuff
sudo chmod 777 /usr/share/my_stuff
cd /usr/share/my_stuff
mv ~/.mozilla .
cd ~
ln -s /usr/share/my_stuff/.mozilla .
My .mozilla directory is now on the faster SSD and the Firefox jitter has disappeared.
hugo wrote:
Why is the larger SSD slower in your opinion?do you have a link to some site providing info on that? I installed everything on the 16GB SSD and have no performance issues at all.
Posted 19 Oct 2008 at 5:50 pm ¶
Martyn wrote:
Hey Hugo, from what I’ve read the write speed to the primary SSD (the 4GB one) is twice as fast as to the secondary (see this thread for example: http://forum.eeeuser.com/viewtopic.php?id=34502). For most stuff both are OK, but I noticed such an improvement to Firefox when its settings directory was on the primary SSD that I had to post about it!
It is worth mentioning that my primary SSD is formatted with ext2 and my secondary is ext3 which also will make a difference.
Posted 19 Oct 2008 at 6:02 pm ¶
James wrote:
Hmm, surely the hard drive speed would be negligable for Firefox – anything visual would be pulled out of RAM and hard disk would only affect things like HDD caching (not a factor in an open tab), load times, etc. Also, even “slower” solid state drives are still very very fast.
Sceptical, very sceptical.
Posted 19 Oct 2008 at 8:51 pm ¶
Martyn wrote:
James, if Firefox is doing a big *write* to disk (which it does do when storing information it thinks you might want to have cached), then this does momentarily hang the application. SSDs are slower on write than read.
You can be sceptical, but how else would you explain the fact that moving the .mozilla directory to the primary SSD has alleviated the issue?
Posted 19 Oct 2008 at 8:56 pm ¶
JohnK wrote:
Man, don’t tell people to do a chmod 777. That’s a real newbie move. Maybe you don’t have anyone else on your computer but other people might. Chmod 777 lets them see your pr0n! Use -
sudo chown /usr/share/my_stuff
sudo chmod 750 /usr/share/my_stuff
Posted 20 Oct 2008 at 10:59 am ¶
Martyn wrote:
Thanks JohnK. You are right, of course… as it was simply for the FF directory I was trying to keep it simple, but I guess if you’ve got… ahem… sensitive stuff in your cache / history then best to lock it down a little as you suggest :-)
Posted 20 Oct 2008 at 11:04 am ¶
Bastett wrote:
Thanks a lot for this tip.
My Firefox experience, while still not as fast as I’d like, has greatly reduced stalling when opening sites.
Posted 21 Dec 2008 at 1:01 pm ¶
Zilvis wrote:
I put my mozilla Browser.cache.disk.parent directory to RAM disk. NICE!
Posted 16 Jan 2009 at 1:29 pm ¶
Mike wrote:
I’ve typed in exactly as above to terminal – firefox now does not load. How do I reverse that process please, so I can use my Eee for browsing again?
Posted 17 Jan 2009 at 4:46 pm ¶
Martyn wrote:
To reverse it, we have to find out what went wrong. Did you see any error messages on any of the steps?
What’s the output of the command
ls -ld ~/.mozilla
and also
ls -l /usr/share/my_stuff
and finally, if you run firefox from the command prompt by simply typing firefox, what error messages (if any) get displayed before it fails to run.
Posted 17 Jan 2009 at 5:00 pm ¶
RGB wrote:
worked for me
(eeepc 901 running easy peasy 1.0)
thx
Posted 28 Jan 2009 at 8:05 pm ¶
Tom Purnell wrote:
Try coupling this with the X optimisation mentioned here http://thatsbibulous.blogspot.com/2008/10/slow-scrolling-in-firefox-3-ubuntu.html for even better ff3 performance.
Posted 19 Feb 2009 at 1:58 am ¶
Martyn wrote:
Interesting, Tom, thanks for the tip. I’ll have to give it a try!
Posted 19 Feb 2009 at 10:17 am ¶
serola wrote:
What if you have multiple users? When you do this fix, will Firefox become faster for all of them? I ask this because I don’t quite understand what this ~/.mozilla contains.
Posted 18 Mar 2009 at 1:42 pm ¶
Martyn wrote:
No, ~/.mozilla contains all your personal settings and data. This isn’t shared, each user has their own. So each user would need to have their ~/.mozilla moved to faster storage.
Posted 18 Mar 2009 at 1:49 pm ¶
serola wrote:
Thanks Martyn :) This is good to know since I share my PCs with other family members.
Posted 19 Mar 2009 at 8:05 am ¶
Web Hosting wrote:
Thanks, it was so helpful………
Posted 11 Jul 2009 at 7:02 pm ¶
SC wrote:
Awesome! I’m using eeebuntu on an EEE 1000 and it totally fixed my only problem with my EEE. Thanks again!
Posted 07 Oct 2009 at 7:41 pm ¶