As you probably know, firefox keeps track of everything you visit while you browse the web infinity, then allows you to quick-search that history just by typing in its awesome bar –err, address bar

Unfortunately, after a while the whole thing slows down and gets a bit annoying. So what Comzeradd tried was to move ~/.mozilla (which includes the history database) on a tmpfs mount.

The difference is staggering! Searches are snappy again and even firefox itself feels faster!

Comzeradd offers a script that syncs your tmpfs ~/.mozilla with a folder on your hdd to make sure you won’t lose your data on reboot/shutdown/powerfail.

I took this a step further by creating a firefox wrapper script. After you move your ~/.mozilla folder to a safe place, this script makes sure that your data is always synced between the tmpfs folder and your hdd folder on a fixed interval.

what the script does, in steps:

1. check that we don’t have any stale ~/.mozilla folder
2. rsync our hdd copy of .mozilla with our tmpfs
3. launch a background process that syncs any changes on the tmpfs .mozilla folder back to our hdd copy every one minute (adjustable)
4. launch firefox
5. when firefox ends, kill background process and sync back to the hdd one last time

To use the script, you’ll first need to mount tmpfs to a folder. On my laptop I have my /var/tmp as tmpfs (useful for gentoo emerges too). To make /var/tmp a tmpfs folder, you need to edit your /etc/fstab file and add the following line:

tmpfs              /var/tmp    tmpfs  size=768M,mode=0777         0 0

You should adjust the size= option based on the ram you have available.

Then just mount the “partition” with:

mount /var/tmp

and execute the script

chmod +x speedfox

speedfox

Thats it! This simple process gives firefox a real boost!

If you start speedfox from a terminal, you can see the rsync info at the beginning and after each minute =]

You can get the script here.

Don’t forget to edit it, read the instructions and configure its variables!