costela.net

[UPDATE: why does the internet insist in making my posts embarrassingly obsolete?]

I had seen this Firefox* SQLite VACUUM trick on Lifehacker, but hadn’t done anything about it. Now for some reason I decided to give it a spin, but manually, since the proposed method didn’t work and I had zero patience to try and debug Firefox’s inner black magic.
Regardless, this certainly breathed some new life in the old guy:

#!/bin/sh
find ~/.mozilla/firefox/ -name *.sqlite | while read db; do 
	sqlite3 $db VACUUM; 
done

It’s no miracle, Firefox’s still a juggernaut, but it makes things sensibly snappier. No idea how long this will last, probably depends on the amount of INSERTS and DELETES that go on daily.

But I wonder why they don’t do that automatically. I thought they did and never bothered to check (still haven’t, to be completely honest). It might be to avoid a small hiccup while the VACUUM’s performed, but then again, so many people complain about Firefox being slower then molasses that I can hardly see the point.

Anyway, it’s easy to complain about other people’s work. Gotta keep reminding myself of the old “show me the code!” motto.

* Iceweasel, whatever…