694687 - "Clear recent history" seems to access I/O synchronously

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Toolkit :: Places, defect)

Description

[Olli Pettay [:smaug][[e-mail]]]

It looks like "Clear recent history" accesses I/O synchronously.
(I didn't verify this by looking at the code!)
And because of that if harddrive is slow, like it can be on 
some laptops, Windows can mark FF as "Not Responding".

All the sync I/O should be removed from main thread.

Comment 1

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

the visits are removed synchronously for privacy and API reasons, but any other stuff happens asynchronously after that. I'd say 20% is synchronous 80% is asynchronous.
There is plan to make that async, but there's lot of stuff to convert to async.

But, in most cases I've seen recently (I'd say 99% of the debugged cases) Clear recent history hangs on cleaning the Cache or Plug-ins data (that is under the Cookies checkbox), so please check if it hangs when checking only Browsing and Download History from the dialog. Or if it hangs checking only cookies (then it's and OOP issue) or checking only cache (then it's a networking cache issue).

Comment 2

[Dietrich Ayala (:dietrich)]

Bump. Olli, did you try the above steps?

Comment 3

[Dietrich Ayala (:dietrich)]

Marco, are there bugs filed for the cache and plug-in hangs?

Comment 4

[Olli Pettay [:smaug][[e-mail]]]

(In reply to Dietrich Ayala (:dietrich) from comment #2)
> Bump. Olli, did you try the above steps?
I didn't, and right now I'm on a very fast SSD hd.
I need to re-test with my macbook which has terrible hd.

Comment 5

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

(In reply to Dietrich Ayala (:dietrich) from comment #3)
> Marco, are there bugs filed for the cache and plug-in hangs?

Various, but this issue is usually misreported as a Places bug, so you wil llikely find more dupes here.
For plug-ins I can probably suggest bug 633427.
For the cache I am aware of bug 670911, that was fixed in FF8, it's likely there are others I'm not aware of.

Comment 6

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

this bug as it is is not much useful here, we know it's not Places fault, and all bugs I was aware of have been fixed. Likely if you can reproduce you should try to restrict possible culprits clearing single entries and file a bug for the specific component.