331244 - purge expired history items during startup and/or runtime too

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 328598

(Firefox :: Bookmarks & History, defect, P4)

Description

[Jo Hermans]

(first posted as bug comment 1)

Shouldn't we have to delete expired records (which aren't loaded in at
startup) at startup and/or during the runtime (every hour or so) ? Now we only do it at shutdown.

Rationale : in 1997 I once installed a Netscape browser (version 3), that was
displaying some meeting shedule. It was for a very busy European Union
governemental conference center, but they had no budget to buy a real
announcement display (airport style), especially because none of them had a
web-interface at that time. So I hacked up something for them. 4 displays were
continuously refreshing their info every minute, but were completely
unattended. After a few weeks they got in trouble with memory leaks and such,
so I told the operators that they had to restart the browser once in a while
(and they were running Windows 95 too, which had its own problems). But they
did it with a remote reboot, which means that the browser was never shut down.

The memory leaks were solved, but those browsers were never shut down the
nromal way (File->Exit). Since the history-cleanup was only done during a
normal startup, this means that the history was growing forever, but never
could be cleaned. Netscape 4 fixed this I think.

Anyway, I worked around the problem by cleaning history during startup (the
displays were running until 2 years ago !!!), but we might be careful in the
current implementation, just in case a user never shuts down cleanly. For most users, there will be almost nothing to clean. If bug 328598 is solved, we can even due it every hour or so.

PS : there's an anecdote about Bill Gates and those displays. I'll tell it
tonight on IRC.

Comment 1

[Jo Hermans]

I'll let it depend on bug 328598 (slow shutdown), because it wouldn't make much sense to have a long waiting period at startup or during runtime. The main purpose is to help with long-lived sessions (an hour or more).

Comment 2

[Jo Hermans]

I'll dupe it to bug 328598, since Brett's patch in bug 328598 comment 33 seems to solve this issue. We'll expire history-items continously. 

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 328598 ***

Comment 3

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

Bug 451915 - move Firefox/Places bugs to Firefox/Bookmarks and History. Remove all bugspam from this move by filtering for the string "places-to-b-and-h".

In Thunderbird 3.0b, you do that as follows:
Tools | Message Filters
Make sure the correct account is selected. Click "New"
Conditions: Body   contains   places-to-b-and-h
Change the action to "Delete Message".
Select "Manually Run" from the dropdown at the top.
Click OK.

Select the filter in the list, make sure "Inbox" is selected at the bottom, and click "Run Now". This should delete all the bugspam. You can then delete the filter.

Gerv