Tuesday, July 28, 2009

Faster Firefox Startup

I can't say I've felt it myself, but some users have been reporting abnormally long startup times when starting Firefox. If you have been waiting for 10+ seconds when you execute Firefox this might be of help.

It looks like the problem has something to do with database fragmentation - which was aggravated by the fact that lots of data are now stored for 90 days (from the 9 days of previous versions)

As data is constantly being manipulated, the database gets fragmented, its size increases, and its performances decreases. That's why you better clean it all up with SQL vacuum.


Doing the vacuum process defragments the DB and recover the "lost" space. You'll not only save disk space, you'll end up with a faster startup time. Some user reported going from a 10s start up time to just 2s.

While the Firefox team doesn't implement a way to do this automatically, I recommend you do this yourself (using the method in the link above) regularly - or whenever you feel it getting slower.


And in case you don't feel comfortable dealing with command line stuff, you can always use IniFox, which does the same in an easier user-friendly way.

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