Installing my first SSD
 

Hi,

I just purchased a Samsung SSD today. All I did was add noatime in /etc/fstab. Everything is pretty fast including boot time.

The only issue is Firefox launch time. I counted, its taking about 10 secs to open. Is this normal or do I need to tweak something ?

What CPU? I use Chromium but I do have firefox installed so I just now saw how long it took to open up firefox the first time since boot.

On a 2.4Ghz Core 2 Duo, it took about 3 seconds. On a 2.0Ghz Core 2 Duo, it took about 4 seconds. If your CPU is much slower/older than that, I wouldn't be surprised at 10 seconds. (Both Debian 8 Jessie, XFCE4 desktop.)

I also tried it on a 1.5Ghz Atom and it took about half a minute for Firefox to open up, but it has various other things slowing it down also.

CPU is AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 5600+
Ram 4 GB.

I have 1 partition in in each drive. On my SSD / including /home and on my HDD I have created a partition and created /data as mount point.

I am using LXDE.

That seems sluggish to me, unless you have some heavyweight plugins (my only plugin in non-free flash).

I'd try temporarily moving ~/.mozilla to ~/DOTmozilla and ~/.cache/mozilla to ~/CACHEmozilla to start it "fresh". Maybe there's something in the mozilla user profile or settings mucking things up.

On the other hand...maybe it's not so sluggish. I think XFCE4 uses a lot of the same GTK2 libs that Firefox uses, so on my systems it would have less to load up. Maybe.

This is a fresh Firefox profile that created half an hour before.

Installed plugins include

NoScript
Bluhell
Ghostery
WebofTrust
Ublock Origin
NetvideoHunter

I have tried totally fresh profiles (without any addons) in the past. Load time becomes pretty fast but I simply cant afford to browse the web without security addons.

I think that 10 seconds may be about right, if those plugins account for about half of the 10 second initial load time. I don't think any amount of SSD speedup will help at all.

If you quit firefox, and then open it again, does it still take about 10 seconds? If so, then all of the file system cache already loaded in RAM (super fast) didn't really help...load time is CPU limited. On my systems, the second load was only marginally faster, if at all.

The load time is marginally fast the second time. So I guess I will have to cope with this.

I think he is right on the plug-ins.


Still would be nicer to have a bit more ram for an AMD64,

If /home is on the hard drive then all the extras are being loaded from it rather than your new SSD. You could mount bind your cache folder and so on to a sub for in /var which is on your ssd. That would likely speed it up a bit.

Personally, I don't see why you are using Ghostery and UBlock Origin. I removed ghostery in favor of unlock a while ago and haven't noticed any down sides. But perhaps you have your reasons.

I can't say with certainty, because I do not use most of the plugins that you use (but I have used NoScript, Ublock Origin, and Adblock Plus), however, I've never used two or more of a category of plugins that is inspecting Web traffic for various features.

When I'm using my employer's systems, I use what they provide. When I'm using my own, I generally use Ublock Origin, and not much else. I'm not that worried about what may or may not happen. Should a tragedy occur, I'll scrap and rebuild a system. Reality is that I've used systems for decades and had less than one handful of intrusions, and 3/4 or more of them have been on systems I was using with others. I've had one Email client temporarily corrupted; it took all of five minutes to fix, and therefore my conclusion is that the platforms I'm using and the information I'm accessing is not ultra sensitive and not highly sought. If it were, I'd put a fortress around it, but it wouldn't be through the use of browser plugins; I suggest that is a band aide at best.

Dump several of them, just as a test and see what happens. Fewer plugins = less overhead.