What chages and adjustments to Chrome/Chromium are most effective to lower the number of writes and prolong the life of SSDs?

I've got a Corsair Force 80 SSD, an AMD APU and 4 gigs of RAM as assets as well as some thumb drives I suppose. I'm running Mint Linux 17.1 64 bit in this box and mostly it's used to crawl the web. Lots of flash based video and chatrooms and Facebook photos live streaming video and etc required of it. (I do volunteer work for a non profit doing educational stuff, not that it matters for my question.) I use Chromium and Firefox browsers except on Facebook where Firefox no longer displays video to 64 bit Linux computers.

I just installed the new operating system alone on the aging SSD a few days ago and did a SMART drive test. Sure enough in a lot of places the SSD is warning that it is old and or has a few misreads etc that seem to point more towards a Corsair's eventual death than its immortality.

So, since my time is limitless and my cash is non existant what are the best practices and tactics I can use to make my browsers as nice as practicable to my poor old hard drive? If I had to pick between speed browsing and wear, and I probably will, I would say 70% of resources towards durability and 30% towards speed.

Solution 1:

All following recommendations are given assuming you're the only user of the PC. If it's not the case, make sure to set up appropriate filesystem permissions on tmpfs in same place you'll create directories.

There are chrome cache directories under ~/.config/google-chrome/Default. On Windows, these dirs are Cache, Media Cache, IndexedDB and GPUCache. Not sure about Linux, but something very similar (I have no Linux box with Chrome at hand to check). Depending on distibutive, Chrome main cache may be in ~/.cache/google-chrome.

// if you're using Chromium instead of Chrome, dir is ~/.config/chromium/Default and ~/.cache/chromium [ref]

1. Make sure you've got another browser as a backup in case you mess up.
2. Add to your startup script (depending on distro and shell) creation of Chrome cache directories (listed above) under /dev/shm/chrome-caches. How to run script after login it is explained in Q#10797150. Use mkpdir -p to create full paths.
3. reboot or once create manually /dev/shm/chrome-caches, close (and kill if it won't exit) Chrome, and them mv Chrome caches (listed above) to /dev/shm/chrome-caches
4. link them back as symlinks: ln -s /dev/shm/chrome-caches/* ~/.config/google-chrome/Default/
5. You can use Chrome right away, but be watchful after reboot, make sure Chrome can access its cache directories (launch it and check that they're not empty). In worst case, you can delete symlinks and Chrome will start will clean cache.

Note though that this will effectively clear Chrome cache and some sites meant-to-be-persistent-data every boot (though not offline google docs, which are in Application Cache, not cookies/history/bookmarks, which will stay intact, and not sync state).