393493 - Cannot delete history of about a million entries -- inefficiency causes operation to timeout

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Firefox :: Bookmarks & History, defect)

Description

[Mats Ahlgren]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686 (x86_64); en-US; rv:1.8.1.4) Gecko/20061023 SUSE/2.0.0.4-1.1 Firefox/2.0.0.4
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686 (x86_64); en-US; rv:1.8.1.4) Gecko/20061023 SUSE/2.0.0.4-1.1 Firefox/2.0.0.4

I cannot delete my history (accumulated over 6 months) by doing select-all and hitting delete. I tried doing this because recently all my new pageloads have been making 1-2 of my 4 CPUs spike to 100% utilization. There's some inefficient code somewhere which is causing:

1- The operation to take 1-3 minutes and then timeout, resulting in no progress (I think) with a popup window saying a script is taking too long.
2- Maximum disk write speed occur during this entire time, but no reads.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Get a really big history (6 months of stuff if you surf the net often)
2. Select-all, hit delete

Actual Results:  
Operation timeout (see description).

Expected Results:  
Successful deletion within 10 seconds, or at least decent visible progress. Total disk writing should not have been on order of many hundreds of megabytes.

I have 2GB of RAM and a 2.66GHz 4-core.

Comment 1

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Mats, do you see this using version 3?

Comment 2

[Mats Ahlgren]

No offense, but I don't think it's reasonable to ask me if I can reproduce this bug: This bug occurs when one has accumulated a few months of heavy search history... about a million entries in the history file.

The only surefire way to reproduce this is probably to create artificial entries in the history file (and also maybe in search history, cookies, etc. if that fails).

It may be unlikely that someone who's downloaded FF3 will have such a large history anytime soon (unless they decided to keep it for some reason), and hence an artificial test may be the best approach... or maybe to leave this bug open for 6 months and close it if there're no comments.

Hope that helps.

Comment 3

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Thanks for the clarification. I've got nothing close to a million - only about 18k entries. But then, my history is only 90 days.

Comment 4

[Shawn Wilsher :sdwilsh]

Bulk closing all UNCONFIRMED bugs dealing with places that haven't had any bug activity in over 120 days, have no votes, and are not enhancement requests.

If you are still experiencing this issue in Firefox 3.0 or later, please re-open the bug with steps to reproduce (if they were not part of the original comment).