Hi,
Brave has massive writes to my new SSD, approx. 1 GB per hour and maybe because of that my speed on SSD suddenly drops from 500 mb/sec on 30-50 mb/sec.
I don’t know why, because I don’t do anything unusual, just surfing. I have windows 11, clean, don’t have viruses, malwares and hijackers.
Do you know how to disable cache, because I think that’s the problem, or can you tell me what can be the problem?
Thank you very much forward.
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Use System Informer (renamed Process hacker) to see that kind of stuff, because you are not providing any proof it is Brave or anything, it is not hard to see which is writing to a disk. If it was Brave, you could easily also use the internal task manager to know what PID is what, and that way know if it is an extension or Brave or the website doing it.
For SI you need to run it as admin and then you can use Disk tab and filter it by Brave, or enable columns to see all the reads and writes from Brave and any program.
But Cache is meant to be built and used, and then browsing will be faster and nothing else will be re-downloaded every time you visit a website, that is the ONLY way of not re-writing information over and over again, so don’t clear any data if you don’t want it to write.
There are ways to REDUCE the cache, but it is not possible to run it 100% off memory or something like that, like some people would want.
In fact, settings like Disable Cache on Devtools is misleading, because it will still write to disk, every file downloaded will be written to disk, the ‘disabled’ part is that it will never use the disk to get the files again, so Developers know they will have the latest files of their website being downloaded, so it will keep downloading constantly the files to disk, just replacing them. Disable the option and you will see it uses the disk/memory, which shouldn’t have happened if it was completely disabled since no files should have existed.
But then, that’s how modern browsers work, even when you use InPrivate windows, which don’t write cache to disk, it is still writing to disk for some things, you can see in SI how it writes some tmp to disk and all that.
You can still search on the internet how to do it on Chrome and use the same process in Brave and test, but I never saw anything really working, any solution they give = you will be writing more to disk because you ‘disabled’ the Cache, but it will keep writing to disk, which is what you want to avoid.
Even removing permissions for the browser to write to Cache folder and others will still write to disk, if you check SI you will see how it writes small portions of .tmp and all that even if they don’t get written to Cache folder.
The only effective way of doing it is If you have another disk, you can Symbolic link/Juction the User Data, and then use it that way or start browser with --user-data-dir= to load it place it from somewhere else.
You can also use --disk-cache-dir= to whatever folder, but then, again, the same, cache and Code cache folders will be written somewhere else, but User Data will still be writing on %localappdata%\BraveSoftware\Brave-Browser-Nightly\User Data\ databases like history and others, it will process the network utility everytime you download something, the .tmps, the GPU cache which is important for a lot of things you to, which you will only get rid of if you disable the GPU acceleration which is a terrible idea.
That’s why you really need to see what is using what, saying “it is writing massively to disk” it is not proof, it is not a fact, you aren’t sure if it is doing it, you think it is doing it.
You could have used Task manager (which is not great because Chromium doesn’t work good with it unlike Edge) but at least that would give you an idea if it is Brave or other, using disk.
I mean, a lot of things in the background use disk, you can’t get rid of it, and if you are afraid of SSD being written, well… I am sorry but you need to stop using technology, SSD have many ways to evenly write to disk and then each block will wear off similarly. That’s how technology works, even if you SSD doesn’t have dram, it should last long and be faster than a mechanical HDD.
Of course if you can reduce the unnecessary writings the better, but in this case we are talking about a browser, downloading and caching every file, that’s why Cache is so important.
That’s why you should test and find the necessary evidence for your claims first; find the proof and knowledge about technology, and not just go Correlation versus Causation, because only because you are using Brave, doesn’t mean Brave is the one causing the writings, just like how airplane having windows is not the reason for them to fly.
But if it is Brave then it should be easily spotted and then properly reported.
You need a proof, here you go!
Brave constantly write something to my SSD and I don’t know what, is it a cache, or something weird I don’t know, but I know it’s killing my SSD because of daily write about 4-5 GB of nothing and SSD write speed is devastated from 500 to just 40 mb/sec! I tried everything, it is not any extension, I don’t have any. This is just for half an hour!
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Brave will cache website elements when loading, just to avoid pulling new data from internet everytime. Just watch it real time, if you compare a site you have (never) visted vs a site you just hit refresh button.
I understand that, but is it normal to write so much data on short time??
Depends on the site being cached, a site with just text and no images vs the extreme with many images. Can you test on a just reading a specific site?
It doesn’t matter which site I visit, it just writes endlessly, for 2 hours it writes about 1,5 GB empty data. Is it normal or what? It stops only when I close browser and when I start, it begin new cycle and so on indefinitely.
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Is there any command to limit the cache, or disable it, instead of moving the folder to an HDD? I see that only browser that can do it is Firefox with “browser.sessionstore.interval” command, but it is very strange that Brave (which is excellent one) doesn’t have it.
Brave is the fastest and most secure Browser, but this cache insanity is the biggest disadvantage.
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My research suggests it is not only cache but greatest offender is the crash pad handler. This is true even if I have disabled session recovery and phone-home reporting.
And even though the crash history is empty.
I have this exact same problem in linux, sometimes the even the brave browser starts to freeze, and takes several seconds for simple things like scrolling, switching to a tab or almost any action, mouse or key based.
Brave is consistently on top in iotop no matter what I’m doing.
Total DISK READ: 0.00 B/s | Total DISK WRITE: 45.32 K/s
Current DISK READ: 0.00 B/s | Current DISK WRITE: 99.15 K/s
TID PRIO USER DISK READ DISK WRITE> COMMAND
323 be/3 root 0.00 B/s 17.00 K/s [jbd2/nvme0n1p5-8]
66964 be/4 alcarraz 0.00 B/s 17.00 K/s brave --profile-directory=Default --app-id=hnpfjngllnobngcgfapefoaidbinmjnm [ThreadPoolForeg]
276115 be/4 alcarraz 0.00 B/s 2.83 K/s alcarraz --pid=66643 --enable-crashpad [ThreadPoolForeg]
Can anyone here experiencing this please confirm for me whether or not they have local IPFS enabled?
As i see it it is the constant Cache writing which creates the most load. Chromium is writing cache without end.
What helps a lot is as already mentioned, to relocate the Cache elsewhere. It is sadly a bit over complicated and should be an option inside the browser settings UI.
–disk-cache-dir=“X:\folder”
If one relocates the Cache on an USB stick/external disk or Ram Cache - all of the mentioned methods work
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What is IPFS? And where can I check if it is enabled?
@alcarraz,
You can find this in Settings --> Web3 --> IPFS.
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Thank you @Mattches, I disabled it and brave is still writing all the time to disk.
I’m defaulting to firefox for the same reason.
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