Booted into FreeBSD, launched Epiphany (GNOME Web), noticed slowness. Opened htop: 800-1200% load in kernel! Ran dtrace to find hot kernel stacks: itβs all ZFS write threads, trying to compress. WTF? I mean, my fault for choosing gzip (I have a tiny SSD for this system, want max compression), but I expect zero I/O right now?! Found a DTrace script to show file I/O.
Turns out Epiphany is constantly writing to and reading from ~/.config/epiphany/gsb-threats.db.
Yeah, it was downloading the whole Google Safe Browsing database.
I guess thatβs the most privacy-friendly way to do Safe Browsing, but wow, thatβs a very surprising behavior. What if I had, like, a dial-up connection or something? :D