Beware Minefield

[tobiaus]

Yes, but TCE's are reloaded fresh everytime. That's one of the advantages is it not? What I'm suggesting is the same: I'm suggesting that TCE's could also be uncompressed onto persistent storage, ...in that scheme there is no system rot.

as far as i know, tce's will not overwrite existing files, system rot would occur for any files that exist before tce's are loaded. that's a very large margin for the same disadvantages. i think tcz's are different.

[wiak]

In PPR/TCE mode the tce's are loaded fresh, so the underlying system is "pristine". Of course the user's mydata.tgz then overwrites that pure system, which is hardly avoidable; except that it's pretty easy to keep backup's of previous mydata.tgz files so that you can quickly return to a known stable situation. The main thing is to keep the underlying system stable and clean; which is why such installation methods are superior to full hd installs - where actual main system rot is a constant danger.

[mcewanw]

I'm wondering if the information provided in the following two links would help with backup (and speed) issues. One concerns using tempfs to store profile info and stopping sqlite's ‘urlclassifier*.sqlite’ files growing hugely out of control, and the other concerns compressing sqlite databases to effect some (large?) speed increases in Firefox usage. I can't try either technique myself at this moment (but certainly intend doing so when I next have some time available for such, whenever that will be!):

http://icehot.wordpress.com/2009/01/04/speed-up-firefox-by-mounting-the-profile-in-tmpfs/

http://icehot.wordpress.com/2009/01/10/linux-firefox-performance-tip/

[tobiaus]

i didn't look at the second one. the first one probably won't help, as ff pretty much already runs in "tmpfs" or similar.

[mcewanw]

Yes, I agree regarding tmpfs. The first link however also gives advice about using about:config to deal with urlclassifier sqlite growth excesses.

[thane]

Would robert's concerns about Minefield/Firefox also apply to Seamonkey?

[tobiaus]

Would robert's concerns about Minefield/Firefox also apply to Seamonkey?

quite possibly. i use minefield regularly, i'm even using it in 2.x and it's fine. note that i'm not making a backup i'm using cloud (but when i use usb and run backup, i'm also using minefield.)

the big difference is i clear my cache when i'm done, and i don't use the massive bookmarking features or keep history set for 90 days (that is a stupid setting, blame mozilla.). you can also set your cache to something more reasonable, but clearing private data when you're done makes all the difference in the world. if i ran backup right now, minefield would not be an issue.

you can also just add the cache (and anything else you don't want to save from boot to boot) to .xfiletool.lst ... i really don't understand why the bad review of minefield. configured properly it shouldn't be any different than any other browser. but if you use it "out of the box," robert's right, don't back all that up you won't like it.

one other thing is flash. without flash many sites are faster. on an old machine using flash9 instead of 10 helps. using 1.x instead of 2 might also help, but 2.0 isn't even release yet, we'll see.

[jpeters]

I like the idea about making links to /tc  whenever possible.  How about .wine, for example? Using a link shaved about 30 seconds off my boot time.  Even without /Program Files, it still runs about 47M.