499832 - live bookmarks make FF3 grind to a halt

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 329534

(Firefox :: Bookmarks & History, defect)

Description

[Brian Littlefield]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/530.5 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/2.0.172.31 Safari/530.5
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.0.11) Gecko/2009060215 Firefox/3.0.11 - Build ID: 2009060215

after install and restoring my bookmarks, FF3 will inexplicably bog down and become unresponsive (or worse, make my entire desktop unresponsive) at regular intervals.  at first indication of unresponsiveness, %CPU and Mem Usage in Task Mgr will go from approx 0-1% CPU and 100MB to bouncing between 12-50%CPU and up to 500MB usage.  
in testing, I have left configurations with no extensions and with extensions.  this makes no difference to result.  installing without bookmarks results in some slow downs, but not this magnitude.  after importing bookmarks file, behavior is always repeated in FF3.x.x.  If rolled back to v2.x.x.x, the problem does not occur.
bookmark file has approximately 700 bookmarks, with about half being live bookmarks.  
approximate interval of bog-downs is 60 minutes, which happens to coincide with the built-in refresh rate for live bookmarks.

also in testing, noted that, when the bog-down initiates, places.sqlite will begin to grow at about 2k/sec continuously until observed bog-down ceases.  other files affected unknown.

export of bookmarks to HTML file immediately after import results in 247k file.  matching places.sqlite with fresh FF install begins at ~6MB upon installation and grows by stated mechanism regularly thereafter.  after three weeks of such behavior, places.sqlite was approximately 66MB in size.

general behavior is consistent even with different sets of bookmarks, but with high proportion being Live Bookmarks.

Again:  this behavior did not and does not occur if installing FF2.x.x.x with same bookmarks.

I suspect that the sqlite database engine is to blame.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.  install any FF3.0.x build
2.  add 600 bookmarks, evenly distributed across live feeds and regular URLs
3.  use for an hour and observe slowing system performance.  sometime in this hour, this behavior will occur.
Actual Results:  
FF3 becomes unusable

Expected Results:  
continuous usability, no lockups or slowdowns lasting more than a moment, especially as a regular occurence.

if the culprit is the live bookmarks, and a memory/CPU spike due to updating them per the built-in refresh rate, the update could be reasonably deferred to on-demand ONLY (i.e. when the live bookmark is selected or moused-over, fetch the feed item, and not before).  on even reasonably fast connections, the delay would be less than 2 seconds to fetch the 50k or so data that's typically contained in the feed.  this would distribute the load to near-invisibility.



this problem exists on my work PC and existed on my wife's home PC before I reverted to FF 2.0.0.20.  I've even started to see it on my home PC which has less than 100 mixed regular and live bookmarks.  so, the number of bookmarks required to kick this off is really very low, and indicates a critical flaw in the functionality of the database bookmarks/history storage mechanism.  
a return to a plain html bookmarks file would fix this quickly.

it's hard for me to imagine a WORSE browser than IE6/7, but FF3.x has achieved that with this critical bug.  I've been trying to isolate the problem by putting up with it for two months in a regular working environment.  without this getting fixed, I will cease using FF3 on the machine on which it is installed, and will revert back to FF2 as long as I can or abandon the software altogether just as I did with Netscape.  It simply does not function WELL anymore.

Comment 1

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

can i suggest you to try Firefox 3.5RC? it contains fix for bug 329534
http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/all-rc.html