Speeding Up Firefox

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Heavy Disk I/O

Firefox seems to have heavy disk I/O issues where it may actively read/write repeatedly to disk rapidly which slows down the function of the browser and may impact other programs operating on the system.

Cache

Linux Solution

Relocating the cache to tmpfs on systems with sufficient RAM (3-4 GBytes or higher) may improve performance, about:config item browser.cache.disk.capacity should be set to a size 10 MBytes below the tmpfs size. 512 MBytes tmpfs will work on a 4 GByte RAM system. This will have a side effect of clearing cache at every system shutdown.

The location of the cache that may be relocated is:

• /home/username/.mozilla/firefox/profilename/Cache

MIME type inefficiency (Linux)

Linux Solution

Relocate the following to tmpfs locations and create scripts to copy their contents from alternate locations into them at bootup:

• /usr/share/mime (tmpfs of this should be 8 MBytes minimum or higher as needed by the contents that would occupy them)
• /home/username/.local/share/mime (tmpfs of this should be 1 MByte minimum or higher as needed by the contents that would occupy them)

Alternate locations may be created at:

• /usr/share/mime_permanant
• /home/username/.local/share/mime_permanant

Note: the files must be available at the original locations, otherwise there may be malfunctions that may occur.