Re: Reduce the server load by asking firefox to not cache on disk

[Petter Reinholdtsen <pere@hungry.com>]

[Nigel Barker]
> However, I thought they were already implemented on real skolelinux
> installs. At least they were on Lenny, I think..

Some of it is already in Skolelinux, but not the cache tuning.

[Klaus Knopper]
> We used a different approach in Skolelinux-RLP: On start of
> firefox/iceweasel, we copy the local .mozilla directory containing
> personal bookmarks, a (small) cache and other db/sqlite files to the
> /tmp-ramdisk in a per-user/per-process directory, and on quitting
> firefox, we copy them back to the users NFS home directory.
> 
> Firefox tends to exessively write on several files, not only cache
> data, and in case NFS does not catch up in time, you get a
> "bufferbloat" self-denial-of-service. From our tests, only exluding
> these files from NFS writes was able to fix a "completely stalled" >
> 20 users NFS setup, where pupils were not able to login anymore when
> more than ten users were running firefox. "Outsourcing" the .mozilla
> directory helped.
> 
> For the firefox starter script, we made a package, it's still
> available at http://rp.skolelinux.de/packages/firefox-tuning/

Interesting approach.  Perhaps something we should replicate for Jessie?

Where is the source package for the firefox-tuning package?  The
directory only contain the .deb.

-- 
Happy hacking
Petter Reinholdtsen