Faster with a Hard Drive???

[alexgill]

So, I'm booting off a USB-key and then running Firefox.  I removed the netbook hard drive, and now when browsing, it seems to be going along slower without it.  

Is it possible that having a hard drive in the computer (not used) affects performance?  TIA.

[^thehatsrule^]

Is there swap on the hard drive?

[alexgill]

The hard drive has the stock Windows7 install and some other Lenovo recovery partitions (s10-3), so not sure if TC could somehow be utilizing the hd in some way as swap...  My suspicion is that removing the hd confuses the system and causes F'fox be somehow jerky and slow... 

Is running F'fox from RAM-only been smooth and responsive for other?  How about Flash performance? 

[thane]

FWIW, I'm running Namoroka (which is a stripped-down version of Firefox) + Flash on a RAM-only setup (2 G). No hard drive, boots off USB and only saves minimal preference settings when I shutdown, and I often shutdown without saving. I set Namoroka to delete browsing history, caches etc. at the end of the session -- keeps cookies though. I use bootcode noswap and turned off everything that might try to write to disk. Seems to work OK.

[tinypoodle]

The hard drive has the stock Windows7 install and some other Lenovo recovery partitions (s10-3), so not sure if TC could somehow be utilizing the hd in some way as swap...  My suspicion is that removing the hd confuses the system and causes F'fox be somehow jerky and slow...

Just checking, your system was powered off while removing the hdd, right?

• Check load, CPU and RAM usage while it's slow; e.g. htop would be a suitable util for such.
• See dmesg and /var/log/messages if latter exist for unusual messages.
• Also try with a new additional profile and see how behaviour is then in comparison.

Is running F'fox from RAM-only been smooth and responsive for other?  How about Flash performance? 

Well that may be a bit subjective, but to me ff has not felt smooth and responsive in comparison to any other browser i have used - at least after version 1.0 - not even when running from ramdisk.

FWIW, I'm running Namoroka (which is a stripped-down version of Firefox)

By what criteria is that stripped-down when namoroka appears to be bigger in size compared to firefox, as well with or without deps?

[thane]

"By what criteria is that stripped-down when namoroka appears to be bigger in size compared to firefox, as well with or without deps?"

Extension_by:   Jason W
Comments:       This is a custom build of Firefox.
                Depends on gtk2 and it's deps.  This is a fairly basic
      build with less   dependencies than the official Firefox.
      The maximum cacne size is 20MB and the urlclassifier
      is disabled.
                This extension is PPI compatible.

Argue with him, not me.

[tinypoodle]

I did read that before posting.
Just that i would interprete the expression "stripped-down" primarily as "smaller in size", if not otherwise specified.
e.g. minefield would qualify for sure as stripped-down firefox.
Historically speaking firefox itself is a stripped down mozilla (its predecessor phoenix having been browser-only of "mozilla suite); interestingly enough seamonkey which is the direct successor of the mozilla suite has always felt less slow to me than any of the rebranded firefox versions, though still slower than any non netscape-based browser I have ever tried out.

[PIRAT507]

About swap: use the command 'free'. It'll give you the total amount of swap and the used amount of swap.

[Jason W]

As for namoroka or any other build I do of Firefox, the advantages come in with the disabled urlclassifier, which when enabled makes use of a file that can grow to 100MB.  Also, defualt cache is smaller.   The extension size differences are almost irrelevant when you are talking about the difference in RAM use during runtime

[Scorp1us]

My system is slower booting/running off USB than with a rotating disk. Make sure you're not using the flash for anything after boot. It could be with HD installed that whatever activity is happening is happening there instead of on the USB.

record your mount points.