Closed Bug 1711400 Opened 3 years ago Closed 3 years ago

Bookmarks and history system not functional: files incorrectly deemed in use

Categories

(Firefox :: Bookmarks & History, defect)

Firefox 88
defect

Tracking

()

RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1653806

People

(Reporter: tethys, Unassigned)

Details

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:88.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/88.0

Steps to reproduce:

Power cut caused ungraceful shutdown.

Actual results:

"The bookmarks and history system will not be functional because one of Firefox's files is in use by another application. Some security software can cause this problem."

Expected results:

Nothing is using those files. This is a result of the crash, and Firefox incorrectly thinking something is in use. I don't know which file, because it doesn't say. However, the likely candidates appear to be places.sqlite and favicons.sqlite. Neither of which are in use (confirmed with lsof and fuser, just to be sure).

Removing those two files (and any associate writeahead log) and restarting the profile seems to fix the problem.

If it makes a difference, my home directory is NFS mounted.

The Bugbug bot thinks this bug should belong to the 'Firefox::Bookmarks & History' component, and is moving the bug to that component. Please revert this change in case you think the bot is wrong.

Component: Untriaged → Bookmarks & History

Hi Tethys,
thank you for your report.

There is a help center article that talks about the issue you’ve described and provides steps to follow. Please refer to https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/fix-bookmarks-and-history-will-not-be-functional

Since the issue has been solved for you, I’ll mark this ticket as Resolved-Works For Me, but please, feel free to reopen it if you experience this issue again and are unable to fix it with the steps of the article

Regards,
Jerónimo.

Status: UNCONFIRMED → RESOLVED
Closed: 3 years ago
Resolution: --- → WORKSFORME

Unbelievable. This does not work for you, and it isn't resolved. The bug (as reported) is that Firefox thinks those files are in use when they're not. Yes, there is a clumsy workaround that re-enables some of the missing functionality by having to mess around with Firefox internal files on the command line. But there's no way you can claim that the Firefox behaviour here is reasonable. Surely it's worth trying to fix the problem?

NFS has issues by itself, and those issues are due to the fact this network file system (like other network file systems, it's not alone...) often lies to SQLite about fsyncs, thus the file can more easily corrupt. There isn't much we can do about that, if the file system lies to SQLite, then all it does to ensure data protection becomes pointless.
The dialog you see is shown to users when we cannot open places.sqlite, we were unable to fix the problem automatically, and the most likely cause for that among our users is another app keeping it busy. But it's not the only cause, corruption is another cause, we just can't list all the possible causes there, but we could do better.
Wording can be improved, and I think this is more or less similar to bug 1653806.

Resolution: WORKSFORME → DUPLICATE
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