191708 - Large downloads.rdf file in profile leads to painful delays in download operations

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 161783

(SeaMonkey :: Download & File Handling, defect)

Description

[Tony Daniel]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.2.1) Gecko/20021130
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.2.1) Gecko/20021130

In attempting to isolate a different problem, I noticed that the downloads.rdf
file had gotten relatively big.  In my case, it was 2.88 MB.  As a test, I
removed the file.  That didn't fix the problem I was investigating, but it fixed
a performance problem that had been growing worse over time (i.e. months).  The
problem it fixed was a long delay (> 20 seconds) when downloading files, even
small files. This is true even though I have selected "Open a progress dialog"
as my download option.

Now that I've discovered this, the problem is easy to workaround--just delete
the downloads.rdf file periodically.  But I think someone should look at this
implementation.  Why, for example, is the file needed at all if I don't use the
full-blown download manager?  And can the code that maintains that file be
rewritten to improve performance for those who _do_ use the download manager.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
In my case, you set the download option to "Open a progress dialog."  You then
download lots of files (to get to 2.88 MB it'll probably take thousands of
files, of any size).  Over time, the responsiveness of the browser (all windows,
not just the one doing the download) degrades to the point of unacceptibility.



I chose "Normal" severity even though the workaround is easy, because the
workaround is not immediately obvious and the performance degradation can get
quite awful over time if you download a couple of dozen files or more per day.

Comment 1

[Bjarne D Mathiesen]

this is a known problem discussed in bug 132755

Comment 2

[[e-mail]]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 161783 ***