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Configuring Chromium

July 07, 2012 — BarryK
One thing that struck me about Chromium web browser is the limited configuration options in the "Preferences" window.

I wish to configure Chromium to minimise writes to Flash memory. The cache is the big one, and I ended up killing it this way:

# ln -s /dev/null /root/.cache

Chromium does complain at startup, but this method does work.

I wanted to know what commandline options there are, but the 'man' page has hardly anything. Instead, you have to look in the source code:
http://src.chromium.org/svn/trunk/src/chrome/common/chrome_switches.cc
http://src.chromium.org/svn/trunk/src/base/base_switches.cc

Apparently, these switches are not stable and liable to change at the whim of the developers.

One guy made ~/.config/chromium/Default/History and ~/.config/chromium/Default/Thumbnails into symlinks to /dev/null, as this files get written to a lot.
However, this causes an error message popup window at startup, although the browser still works. I was not able to suppress that error window.

Comments

tmpfs /dev/shm


But such tiny ram
Username: BarryK
"The worry I have with using a tmpfs is that ram is only 256MB on the RP. Putting more and more stuff into the tmpfs while surfing with Chromium will reduce the available ram, and gradually choke the whole system. There is a commandline option to limit cache size, but it doesn't work. Perhaps that is because we have an older version of Chromium in Debian Squeeze.

have you checked out browsers designed for running from flash in a low memory environment?
Username: disciple
"There are/were a number of projects (e.g. gpe, matchbox) to essentially produce loosely coupled "desktop environments" for mobile devices. On some of them the apps don't really look different from typical desktop apps. But their design should target "a low memory and flash footprint". Have you looked at whether any of them have a suitable browser for Puppy? Which reminds me... I need to check out gpe-filemanager some time.


 "PeterM321"According to http://superuser.com/questions/378991/what-is-chrome-default-cache-size-limit: .... --disk-cache-size=xxx (in bytes) You can check the Current Cache size & Max size by heading over to chrome://net-internals/#httpCache page ..... But also there is the possibility to create a small ramdisk: mkdir /tmp/ccache mount -t tmpfs -o size=5m /dev/shm /tmp/ccache mkdir /tmp/ccache/.cache ln -s /tmp/ccache/.cache /root/.cache And see if Chromium can tolerate the small limit.


Tags: puppy