Comments on: Diagnosing Slow Startup

By: geeknik

geeknik — Fri, 28 Jan 2011 00:14:15 +0000

Asa, I have a Windows batch file that runs the vacuum command for me:

@FOR %%G IN (*.sqlite) DO ( sqlite3 %%G “VACUUM” )

Have to have the Windows sqlite3 binaries installed first though. =)

By: khj

khj — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 02:07:48 +0000

good words

By: David B

David B — Fri, 22 Oct 2010 02:18:07 +0000

In my case, Firefox was taking 6-10 seconds to open. I went in to Tools – Add-Ons and disabled the AVG Safe Search and AVG Security Toolbar. After a restart, Firefox would open in less than one second. Repeatable and consistent. After enabling the AVG Security Toolbar, the start up time was about the same maybe a fraction of a second longer. The long start up delay returned after I enabled AVG Safe Search. Be safe or not to be safe… That is the question best thought about before permanently disabling AVG Safe Search.

By: Taras

Taras — Thu, 14 Oct 2010 10:21:05 +0000

@David Naylor yes and it’s too bad for us.

@Andy yeah, that’d be a funny/cool feature. Perhaps someone should do a perf-analysis firefox addon that complains about stuff like that

@Kurt, thanks for answering Asa’s question.

@jmdesp, replied in http://blog.mozilla.org/tglek/2010/07/22/file-fragmentation/#comments

To everyone, sorry for the huge delay in responding.

By: jmdesp

jmdesp — Tue, 12 Oct 2010 15:48:58 +0000

Taras, did you investigate fragmentation as a source for slow startup ?

Report of UltraDefrag on my disk :
Number 3 culprit :
121 C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox 3.5\xul.dll -
Number 4 culprit :
71 C:\Documents and Settings\USER\Local Settings\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\XXXXX.XXX\startupCache\startupCache.4.little

And various Firefox profile related file, as well as cache files, are all over the report.

I think that firefox updates are ugly for fragmentation (and there’s also something very wrong happening for the startupCache).

By: Kurt (supernova_00)

Kurt (supernova_00) — Tue, 05 Oct 2010 21:25:23 +0000

@ Asa:

1) Type about:config in the location bar and hit enter
2) Filter for ‘devtools.errorconsole.enabled’
3) Toggle this preference to true by double-clicking it (I can’t remember if you have to restart or not)
4) Go to Tools -> Error Console
5) Paste the code in the ‘code:’ input box
6) Click the ‘Evaluate’ button

Firefox may freeze for a few seconds while the vacuum is performed.

By: Asa

Asa — Tue, 05 Oct 2010 18:50:52 +0000

How does someone on a Firefox trunk nightly perform the manual vacuum without a JS console?

By: Andy

Andy — Tue, 05 Oct 2010 14:30:31 +0000

I once rooted my work desktop because the IT director flatly refused to change the “scan every file on every read” behavior to something more sensible (“scan on write”, perhaps?). A project I was working on required me to regularly load and unload various Java runtimes. The draconian antivirus settings turned a 15-second process into a 3-5 minute waiting game. After a few (dozen) iterations I started to realize how much more time I was spending staring at a screen compared to running the same tests on my own hardware.

Wouldn’t it be funny if Firefox tossed up a scary-looking prompt?

“You’re computer is slow because of your antivirus settings!!! Click here for more information!!!”

By: David Naylor

David Naylor — Tue, 05 Oct 2010 08:24:11 +0000

The on-access anti-virus scanning is basically a standard feature of every anti-virus out there, right?