489173 - Latest Google Toolbar Appears to Make places.sqlite Massive

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Toolkit :: Places, defect)

Description

[Shawn Wilsher :sdwilsh]

See the url, but we recently had someone come on irc with this problem as well.  Looks like google is taking a screenshot of every visited page, and then storing it as an annotation.

This bug is a tracker for the issue.

Comment 1

[Craig Box]

I'm the someone on IRC.

delete from moz_annos where anno_attribute_id = 11;  // 11 =
'google-toolbar/thumbnail'
vacuum;

places.sqlite went from 220MB to 23MB.  Shaved another MB by removing
anno_attribute_id 12, 'google-toolbar/thumbnail-score'.

Comment 2

[Craig Box]

If you untick "Enable the Google new tab page" in Google Toolbar options, it appears to remove the entries from moz_anno_attributes.  I'm not sure if it would also have removed the annotations, as I removed them manually myself, but even if it did I would not expect it to vacuum.

Comment 3

[Craig Box]

Reported to Google support forum (best bug tracker I could find): 
http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Toolbar/thread?tid=6e4054eeeb0e5d4e&hl=en

Comment 4

[Shawn Wilsher :sdwilsh]

Hey kev,

Do we have any contacts on the Google Toolbar team?  The places team would like to get in touch with them about this as it can cause some major performance problems for users.

Comment 5

[Kev Needham [:kev]]

Sending request, will cc:

Comment 6

[Dietrich Ayala (:dietrich)]

the post to Google Help: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Toolbar/thread?tid=6e4054eeeb0e5d4e&hl=en

Comment 7

[Dietrich Ayala (:dietrich)]

(In reply to comment #6)
> the post to Google Help:
> http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Toolbar/thread?tid=6e4054eeeb0e5d4e&hl=en

bah.

Comment 8

[Kev Needham [:kev]]

Just an update, I spoke with the Toolbar product team, and they have addressed this with their pending release.

Comment 9

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

Any strong-heart person who wants to get rid of thumbnails can run these queries on his db.
This is provided as is, no guarantee, and big WARNING (this could destroy your data, BACKUP FIRST!):
DELETE FROM moz_items_annos WHERE anno_attribute_id = (SELECT id FROM moz_anno_attributes WHERE name = "google-toolbar/thumbnail");
DELETE FROM moz_annos WHERE anno_attribute_id = (SELECT id FROM moz_anno_attributes WHERE name = "google-toolbar/thumbnail");
DELETE FROM moz_anno_attributes WHERE name = "google-toolbar/thumbnail";
VACUUM;

Comment 10

[Craig Box]

Latest release seems to fix this issue.

Comment 12

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

now that will have vacuum support, i definately want a preventive maintenance task to fix this.

Comment 13

[u49640]

Just re-posting my suggestion from #514187:

Firefox could blacklist this specific version of the google toolbar to prevent issues like this.

(i dont know if vacuum means the same as backup/restore, but on my case, it helped to do a backup & restore)

this huge file caused also massive delays when firefox was closed (up to 15 minutes on a 2GHz AMD Sempron), not only wasted space on the disk (see #514187)

Comment 14

[Kohei Yoshino]

What's the status of this bug?

I just saw a latest tweet which reports this issue:
https://twitter.com/a_ars/statuses/4843452768456704
and SQLite Optimizer is still ranked in the top 10 of our add-ons site:
https://addons.mozilla.jp/firefox/extensions/?sort=downloads&num=10

Comment 15

[Shawn Wilsher :sdwilsh]

(In reply to comment #14)
> I just saw a latest tweet which reports this issue:
> https://twitter.com/a_ars/statuses/4843452768456704
Could you provide a translation of that please?

Comment 16

[Kohei Yoshino]

The tweet claims
> places.sqlite of Firefox has surpassed 400 MB. I heard Google Toolbar was 
> responsible for this issue. Dropping a table called moz_annos with PupSQLite 
> resulted in 22 MB.

Comment 17

[Shawn Wilsher :sdwilsh]

(In reply to comment #16)
> The tweet claims
> > places.sqlite of Firefox has surpassed 400 MB. I heard Google Toolbar was 
> > responsible for this issue. Dropping a table called moz_annos with PupSQLite 
> > resulted in 22 MB.
Well, dropping the table is a pretty terrible idea.  That will break Sync an anything else that uses annotations.  We can't really do anything about this because Google was using one of our public APIs (there were just using it *a lot*).  I would hope the Google would clean up after themselves, but if they haven't, we should get in touch with them.

Comment 18

[alex_mayorga]

"Google Toolbar for Firefox has been discontinued

For details, see the announcement. There will be no further updates or security fixes to Google Toolbar for Firefox. For this reason we strongly recommend discontinuing the use of the toolbar."

https://www.google.com/intl/en/toolbar/ff/