646802 - browsing history cleared at regular intervals

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: Bookmarks & History, defect)

Description

[Andreas M. Kirchwitz]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:2.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/4.0
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:2.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/4.0

While Firefox 4.0 (final) is running, the browsing history (Ctrl-H) is cleared at regular intervals. Firefox (automatically) sets places.history.expiration.transient_current_max_pages to 5357, places.history.expiration.interval_seconds and places.history.expiration.max_pages are not set.

The system has only 256 MB of RAM, so I assume Firefox wants to do me a favor by clearing the history every time places.history.expiration.interval_seconds is reached. But there's no need to save memory, and those few bytes for history don't really count compared to the memory footprint of firefox.exe itself. There's still unused memory, but maybe not the high percentage/amount Firefox tries to keep free.

In opposite to Firefox 3 (and before), Firefox 4 doesn't seem to support a lower limit for history entries (only a maximum). I'm wondering that places.history.expiration.transient_current_max_pages is set to such a high value because in fact it's 0.

Happens with or without plug-ins.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Get a system with 256 MB of RAM.
2. Start Firefox and visit some sites.
3. Wait until history is purged automatically (at regular intervals).
Actual Results:  
History doesn't keep any history for long.

Expected Results:  
Keep number of browsing history entries at least "near" places.history.expiration.transient_current_max_pages

I understand that places.history.expiration.transient_current_max_pages is "max pages", not "min pages", but I really like to keep at least some history and not nothing at all. There should be a lower limit (no matter what Firefox thinks about memory utilization).

Btw, I have around 8.000 bookmarks. Maybe Firefox 4 erroneously includes this number when expiring entries from places.sqlite? 8000 is greater than 5357, so that could explain why the browsing history is cleared - but I would expect, that places.history.expirition.* only relates to browsing history and not bookmarks as well. But that's just a wild guess.

Comment 1

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

Ah, this is an interesting case, indeed your number of bookmarks is inflated pretty much, and your system doesn't cope with it.

places.history.expiration.transient_current_max_pages accounts globally for pages in history and bookmarks, because it's a value we compute based on the system specs. It's a value that tries to preserve decent performances.

We can consider some tweaking for cases where number of bookmarks is so high, in the meanwhile, to workaround the problem you can create a new pref called places.history.expiration.max_pages and set it to a number > 8000 (the remaining part of this value, subtracting number of bookmarks will cover history).

Apart this, memory is cheap, considering the number of bookmarks you have to manage I'd suggest an upgrade.

Comment 2

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

the current algorithm always keeps at least the last week of history, and the pref can be tweaked to keep more.