Closed Bug 415969 Opened 16 years ago Closed 16 years ago

Several seconds of disk activity shortly after startup

Categories

(Firefox :: Bookmarks & History, defect)

x86
Windows XP
defect
Not set
normal

Tracking

()

RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

People

(Reporter: egor.pelevin, Unassigned)

Details

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9b4pre) Gecko/2008020604 Minefield/3.0b4pre
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9b4pre) Gecko/2008020604 Minefield/3.0b4pre

I have more than 600 downloads in my download manager and a slow 2.5" 4200 rpm HDD. Shortly after startup Firefox freezes for 5-6 seconds actively using the HDD. It seems to be a consequence of download manager initialisation (bug 399838) Deleting/renaming downloads.sqlite helps, 'Clear list' command from the download manager does not (database not compacted?).

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Get a long list of downloads
2. Start Firefox 


Actual Results:  
Freeze with several seconds of disk activity


Expected Results:  
No freeze
We don't init the download manager until something like 10 seconds after the first window is shown.  Is this the "shortly after startup" you are talking about, or sooner?

(In reply to comment #1)
> We don't init the download manager until something like 10 seconds after the
> first window is shown.  Is this the "shortly after startup" you are talking
> about, or sooner?
> 
Yes, about 10 seconds, but this leaves me only a couple of seconds between my homepage loading and the freeze. I have enough time to open a few bookmarks from the Bookmarks Toolbar, but their loading is interrupted for 5-6 seconds.
I can confirm this problem.  The browser freezes for some seconds after startup, and there is hard disk activity.  Buttons, menus don't respond, even animated GIFs stop (or become choppy).

I have only 5 items in the download manager at the moment.

The strange thing is that this happens only once per day, after the first startup, therefore it is difficult to track down the cause.  The only way to see this problem again is to wait another day: a browser restart or machine reboot does not trigger it.

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9b4pre) Gecko/2008021204 Minefield/3.0b4pre ID:2008021204
Other possible causes:
1) Livemarks - I don't have them
2) Phishing protection - disabled
3) Add-on updates - disabled

>I have only 5 items in the download manager at the moment.
What is the size of downloads.sqlite in your profile?
Using Process Monitor by Sysinternals I discovered that the disk usage was due to reading of places.sqlite. After compacting the database with SQLite Database Browser its size went down from 36MB to 8.5MB. places.sqlite reading time went down from 24s to 6s.
Component: Download Manager → Places
Summary: Several seconds of disk activity shortly after startup (download manager initialisation?) → Several seconds of disk activity shortly after startup
Version: unspecified → Trunk
QA Contact: download.manager → places
I still see this problem often, but I'm *cannot* reproduce it at will, and this is frustrating (I played a little with the app.update.lastUpdateTime values).

Egor, my downloads.sqlite is 29 kb, places.sqlite is 5 MB.  I'll try compacting the latter, and see if the problem goes away.
On both OS X and Linux (RHEL5, to be exact), I often get into situations where I am restarting, that causes several tabs to be reloaded, and CPU starts spinning at 100%. I'm not sure if this is the same problem as here or not (not sure how much disc activity is going on). (I never had this problem in Firefox 2, so I'm not sure it's the same as bug 283130, which looks rather old.)

When one or more of the tabs contain flash animations, the problem seems to be exacerbated, but otherwise flash works fine on my boxen, and I have experienced the problem even without flash pages.

For an example, I just had Firefox stuck with 100% CPU on Linux for a good couple minutes reloading 4 tabs. FWIW, one of the tabs was youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-9SOq_QgsQ and the other was a Fedora package listing: http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/releases/9/Everything/source/SRPMS/

Version info (for Linux... my Macbook isn't handy right now):
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.0.1) Gecko/2008070206 Firefox/3.0.1
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).
Status: UNCONFIRMED → RESOLVED
Closed: 16 years ago
Resolution: --- → INCOMPLETE
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
Component: Places → Bookmarks & History
QA Contact: places → bookmarks
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