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Tweaks to minimize FFP from accessing thumbdrive

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January 22, 2008 - 10:55am
#1
rocketbear79
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Tweaks to minimize FFP from accessing thumbdrive

First of all, let me start out by saying that I have been browsing these forums for quite some time and have gotten a lot of useful information, so thank you folks.

Here's my issue, I am running PA off a brand new Flash Voyager 2GB (limited tech budget won't allow me to go GT). Most of the applications run fine, but FFP is pretty slow. I assume this is due to the slower small file writing speed of the Voyager (something I wish I had learned from this site before my purchase).

I am attempting everything I can to speed up FFP and minimize the accessing of the drive.

Here is what I have done so far:
about:config stuff:
1. browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewer set to 0
2. network.http.pipelining to true
3. network.http.proxy.pipelining to true
4. network.http.pipelining.maxrequests to 30 (yeah I know what this does to webservers sometimes)
5. config.trim_on_minimize to true
6. browser.sessionstore.enabled to false

options stuff:
7. Disabled History and Form Saving
8. Disabled Anti-phishing
9. Disabled cookies, except for the sites I need them on

misc:
10. converted drive to NTFS no security

I still see FFP accessing the drive quite often and have some delays when browsing and even typing.

I am running both 2.0.0.11 and 3-beta2 with these settings, 3-beta2 seems a little faster though.

The only extensions I am running are AdBlock+, FlashBlock, and DownThemALL.

Is there anything else I can do or anything I missed that can help tweak this up a bit more?

Thanks in advance,

RocketBear

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January 29, 2008 - 9:52am
rocketbear79
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Last seen: 15 years 7 months ago
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So I should assume...

I'm doing everything I can?

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January 29, 2008 - 10:03am
(Reply to #2)
rab040ma
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Joined: 2007-08-27 13:35
Was there some tip somewhere

Was there some tip somewhere that told you NTFS would be better for minimizing drive writes? It does store small files in the same block where its directory info gets placed, and you can turn off "last access" tracking, but those minimize only some writes. I thought FAT was even more stingy with writes and reads ... but I could be wrong.

Are you talking about read access (which is fast and non-destructive) or write access (which is slow and can destroy the storage area after 10000 writes or so) or both? Have you used something like Sysinternals ProcessMonitor to see where Firefox is accessing the drive? Concentrating on writes would give you the most speedup.

MC

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January 29, 2008 - 10:29am
(Reply to #3)
rocketbear79
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Last seen: 15 years 7 months ago
Joined: 2008-01-22 10:16
Yeah I think the writes are

Yeah I think the writes are the concern. As for the NTFS thing, I just know it to be a slightly faster drive format and I like the safety of being able to know if I lose connection to the drive that it will mitigate loss.

I'm going to try out Process Monitor right now and report back in a bit on my findings.

Your comment about the last access made me think about something, I went and checked and found that damn indexing service was enabled on the drive so I just disabled that.

I use this drive quite frequently, that is another reason I went with the cheaper version, I'll probably wear it out within the year.

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January 29, 2008 - 10:48am
(Reply to #4)
rocketbear79
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So, running ProcessMonitor,

So, running ProcessMonitor, it seems to only be doing writes to \PortableApps\FirefoxPortableTest\Data\profile\cookies.sqlite-journal, and obviously only on sites where I am allowing cookies (such as this site). I wish there was a way to get it to just hold the cookies in memory and write them out once on close.

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January 29, 2008 - 11:24am
rab040ma
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Have you experimented with

Have you experimented with the "runlocal" option? I think that puts more of the temporary files in the user temp folder. It's supposed to allow FFP to work from a CD which obviously doesn't allow writing.

https://portableapps.com/support/firefox_portable#cd

MC

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January 31, 2008 - 2:24pm
(Reply to #6)
rocketbear79
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Joined: 2008-01-22 10:16
Thanks

I'll give that a shot. I appreciate all your help on this.

Edit: Reading up on that it sounds like its almost what I am looking for. Too bad there isn't an ini command to migrate the temp settings created back to the thumb drive on exit instead of just deleting them. I imagine this could be done manually though as well.

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February 1, 2008 - 12:07pm
(Reply to #7)
rocketbear79
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Last seen: 15 years 7 months ago
Joined: 2008-01-22 10:16
This is working great

The only issue I seem to be having is that Adblock+ acts like its not compatible when I first open FF. I have to manually go to the extensions and click update, it says a "compatibility patch has been applied" and a quick restart makes it work. But I need to do this every time it reloads the settings into the local temp directory.

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