Firefox does a lot of IO to the disk even thou you have lots of spare Ram, due to Sqlite, Bookmarks, History and Cache.
To make Firefox faster is to store the whole profile folder into a Ram Disk.
RamDisk in Linux are called TmpFS. You can also use shared memory folder /dev/shm if you have it in your fstab.
This post in the gentoo forums explains how to do it in Gentoo linux.
I made a similar script to make it work in OSX Leopard.
The Script have 2 parts, Start.sh and Stop.sh
Here are the Scripts:
Start.sh
#!/bin/bash # Run this script to enable the Ramdisk for Firefox profiles VolumeName="Mozilla" # Size in MB, make sure is not too low or not too high SizeInMB=220 NumSectors=$((2*1024*SizeInMB)) DeviceName=`hdid -nomount ram://$NumSectors` echo $DeviceName diskutil eraseVolume HFS+ RAMDisk $DeviceName # move the current profiles folder mv Profiles Profiles_ && # make a symlink to the ramdisk ln -s /Volumes/RAMDisk ./Profiles && # then copy it to the ramdisk /bin/cp -r Profiles_/* Profiles
Stop.sh
#!/bin/bash cd ~/Library/Cache/Firefox/ # clean the cache rm -rf Profiles/*/Cache/* && # will save your modifications back to the DISK /usr/bin/rsync -av --delete ./Profiles/ ./Profiles_/ && # sometimes during unmount it will say disk is in use. # make sure you close firefox before. umount /Volumes/RAMDisk && rm -rf Profiles && mv Profiles_ Profiles
You can also use ‘tar’ instead of ‘rsync’. I just love rsync more.
* Warning: The ramdisk contents will be erased after you umount the ramdisk.
Have fun.
Update:
To speed up firefox even more run these commands:
cd ~/Library/Caches/Firefox/Profiles for i in */*.sqlite; do sqlite3 $i VACUUM;done; cd ~/Library/Application\ Support/Firefox/Profiles for i in */*.sqlite; do sqlite3 $i VACUUM;done;
Mathaba.net
Hi! I can’t seem to get this to work on my system. I created the start.sh file and placed it inside the folder where it is supposed to run. But nothing is being copied.
U may have to modify a little the script.
do you have macports installed?
what does it say when you run?
did make the script executable?
$ chmod 755 start.sh
I changed the script above a little.
Hi! could you please post the script using TAR instead of rsync ?
I’m not a bash expert and wasn’t able to use rsync nor to install it
Thank you very much in advance!
wouldn’t it make sense to use a “lighter” fs than HFS+ in this case?
i like hfs+ cause it has journaling and is native to OSX…
I’m no way gonna use fat32. :)
As a beginner I’ve been attempting this with partial success with firefox 3.6.
Is there anything that needs to be changed with the script for 3.6 and for 4?
Cheers, BBB
Success! I’m already using an Esperance DV RAMdisk and used the latter part of the “start” script to move and symlink the profile folder as per your instructions. Beginners trying that will need to cd the path to the folder containing ‘Profiles’, finding that via ‘about:support’ in the address window in FF. Awesome, cheers!