339493 - 100 % CPU usage firefox due to many cookies.txt files

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 257288

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[mmzel]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; de; rv:1.8.0.3) Gecko/20060426 Firefox/1.5.0.3
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; de; rv:1.8.0.3) Gecko/20060426 Firefox/1.5.0.3

too many coockies in coockies directory, coockies stack (?) too long, pc freeze or very slow, unnecessery coockies delete - it works !

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Ryan Jones-Ward [:sciguyryan]]

Firefox does not use a cookies directory, they are stored in a file. Would you care to clarify this bug?

Comment 2

[mmzel]

ok, itsn't the coockies directory, its the file coockies.txt. wenn too many coockis in the file, then pc get in "100 % CPU usage", why ??? in 2 pc's unnecessery coockis delete, both now ok, no problems.

Comment 3

[Wiweb]

I have noticed a strange behaviour of Firefox: CPU usage was going up to 100%  every time I was opening a new page. But astonishingly, this was not the case when the page was on my local disk (a static page with only links to other pages).

I was running Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-GB; rv:1.8.0.6) Gecko/20060728 Firefox/1.5.0.6.

I checked my computer against spywares: there was none.

I checked my computer against viruses: there was none.

After having runned Firefox-safe with the same strange behaviour, I deleted all my plugins. No improvement.

I decided to uninstall Firefox/1.5.0.6.and re-install the first version Firefox 1.0. No improvement.

Finally, I found in C:\Documents and Settings\my-username\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\15s4no9r.default  more than 5000 cookies-nnnn.txt!!

When I deleted them, Firefox was running fine again!!!

Cause of this: for privacy reasons, I marked the file "cookies.txt" as read-only  as this was a known trick in Netscape for not saving the cookies on disk (but still accepting them in memory).

In Firefox, this has as consequence that a second read-only file is created: cookies.txt.moztmp".

Once this file is present, all the subsequent cookies are stored apparently as cookies-1.txt", "cookies-2.txt", "cookies-3.txt" and so on.

To solve this problem, just make "cookies.txt" read-write again, suppress "cookies.txt.moztmp" and in Tools, Options, choose "Keep cookies until I close Firefox" or something similar depending on the version of Firefox. You will notice that your "cookies.txt" remain the same (empty) even if you visited 1000 sites with 1000 cookies each!

See also (amongst others):

Bug 257288 read-only profile files (cookies, bookmarks, etc) not respected, results in data loss
Bug 297313 multiple cookies files made in profile
Bug 339493 100 % CPU usage firefox

Comment 4

[Steve England [:stevee]]

Reporter, do you still see this problem with the latest Firefox 2? If not, can you please close this bug as WORKSFORME. Thanks!