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As the session recovery feature in Chrome and Firefox does a lot of disk writing which isn't good for an SSD, Firefox has a solution, but I'm not aware of one for Chrome. There are workarounds that involve using a USB/SD card/external hard drive for the Chrome profile folder. You could either use the "c:\Program Files (x86)\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe"--user-data-dir=..." command to move the profile folder to the external drive, or create a symbolic link on the local appdata folder that points to a external drive folder. The result of this would be that on the one hand the actual installed program folder would be on the SSD itself so Chrome would presumably run on the SSD's resources, while on the other hand the profile/appdata folder and the cache would be on the external drive, so Chrome wouldn't be writing to the SSD.

Are there any disadvantages to these workarounds (i.e. putting the Chrome profile folder on an external drive)? Which would be the better one? And does anyone have a better workaround or solution to this?

Thank you very much.

semo
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2 Answers2

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I happen to have a lot of RAM available, so have configured /tmp as a RAM-disk, reducing some of the wear and tear on the SSD (it's also faster).

Extending this idea, I symlinked ~/.cache to /tmp/home/[userid]/.cache.

A large amount of Chrome data now ends up there:

$ du -s -m ~/.cache/*  |  sort -n  | tail -3
4   /home/ray/.cache/tracker
416 /home/ray/.cache/google-chrome
529 /home/ray/.cache/thumbnails

That's nearly a gigabyte, all from Chrome, all in fast access ROM.

Yes, when I reboot it will all get lost and Chrome will be a little slower for a while, but for me that might not happen for many months.

Ray Butterworth
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This Chrome bug is not fixed in years (and also few related issues):

https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=176727

And it does not even have the settings to delay / reduce writing rate (Firefox has). That is really strange.

Disabling Chrome prefetch feature reduces writes a bit: https://www.technipages.com/google-chrome-prefetch

However, there is Opera browser for Linux which is based on the same V8 engine, using the same set of sites (including gmail and youtube), it has about 10 times less writes than Chrome.

So I suggest to try using Opera, especially because the recent versions of it are based on the same engine.

sudo snap install opera
Dmitriy Sintsov
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