Bookmarks causing Firefox to hang

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dartiss
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Bookmarks causing Firefox to hang

Post by dartiss »

Hi,

I've been having problems with bookmarks causing Firefox to hang - it does recover, but continues to hang for long periods of time if I continue looking at bookmarks. It appears to be a particular issue when viewing them in the sidebar or searching via the organiser.

I suspect it's due to the number I have - over 2000. However, this is not been an issue until a few months ago (I can't pin-point exactly when).

I've tried disabling Firefox Sync, as I thought that might be a suspect, but it's the same. I run Firefox on both an XP netbook and a Win 7 64-bit desktop and it's the same on both.

Any suggestions - I don't want to have to move to using Delicious or, god help it, another browser but, at the same time, I need to continue to be able to access my bookmarks.

I'm running Firefox 3.6.12 on all machines.

Thanks,
David.
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dfoulkes
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Re: Bookmarks causing Firefox to hang

Post by dfoulkes »

How long are the hangs?

I would start by starting up Firefox (FF) in safe-mode to see what happens...
This is only for Firefox safe-mode...Don't check off any of it's safe-mode boxes...
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Safe_Mode

You might also want to check out this extension...
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/13878
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dartiss
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Re: Bookmarks causing Firefox to hang

Post by dartiss »

I just timed a simple search within the Bookmarks Organiser and it locked up for 80 seconds whilst producing a result.

I've tried safe mode and it does the same. I've also tried vacuuming the bookmarks to no avail.

David.
lawrenceg
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Re: Bookmarks causing Firefox to hang

Post by lawrenceg »

There is a known problem with searching since sqlite was updated. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=595530 It is no longer marked as blocking Firefox 4 beta 8, so unless you get a build with the fix it could be a long wait.
If you are willing to live dangerously, going back to Firefox 3.6.10 will fix it (if the sqlite problem is in fact the problem you have) - I would not do so though if I were you. Maybe use the time until Firefox 4 final, or 4 beta 9 comes out to try a different browser.
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malliz
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Re: Bookmarks causing Firefox to hang

Post by malliz »

The OP is using
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-GB; rv:1.9.2.12) Gecko/20101026 Firefox/3.6.12
So I doubt a bug that is blocking FF4 has much interest to him
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lawrenceg
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Re: Bookmarks causing Firefox to hang

Post by lawrenceg »

The bug is also in Firefox 3.6.11 and 3.6.12 (mentioned in the bug link)- because the sqlite upgrade was applied to 3.6.*.
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dfoulkes
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Re: Bookmarks causing Firefox to hang

Post by dfoulkes »

dartiss
2000 bookmarks is not a huge number. I suppose one of the things that could cause some slowdown is if you have folders nested in folders nested in folders... deep tree in other works.

I have around 800 bookmarks with a max of 3 levels of folders... I just did a search for "aaa" results took less than one second to display.

It could be very likely that you have some type of corruption in your Places.sqlite file. You might want to backup your Places.sqlite file (your should only have one), open up your Bookmarks Organizer and get into Import/Export... Export to a HTML file some place... then open it up in Firefox to see what it looks like... I suppose that if it's got a corruption issue lots of your bookmarks may be missing.

Or... your could create a test profile and Import that HTML file into it and then play with the bookmarks (search) to see what happens.
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Creating_a_ne ... on_Windows
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dartiss
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Re: Bookmarks causing Firefox to hang

Post by dartiss »

Thanks for the reply.

The number of folders is not an issue as I have only a few - I use tags for my bookmarks rather than folder and sub-folder nesting. Actually, having checked I have nearly 4000 bookmarks.

The problem with exporting and then recreating is that (afaik) the HTML export doesn't include the tags. Is there a way to recreate the database and retain all this information?

I don't have any personal in my bookmarks, so would it help if I make my database file available for anyone to try and see if they can see the same issue?

David.
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dartiss
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Re: Bookmarks causing Firefox to hang

Post by dartiss »

A quick update...

I've found that the bookmark export to JSON retains the tag information so I exported the list to a fresh profile. I did a search and it hung as usual.

I therefore set about deleting out the few folders I have one-at-a-time to narrow down the issue. Now, I used to keep my bookmarks in folder and sub-folders so some time ago I moved all those bookmarks into a folder named "To Sort". What I'm slowly doing is picking them off and tagging them. The tagged bookmarks are then not being saved to a folder but appear in the "Unsorted" view. It's this Unsorted folder that's causing the hangs - it has 2367 bookmarks within it. the JSON and HTML files don't appear corrupt in anyway.

Any thoughts? Is there an issue with having them unsorted?

David.
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dfoulkes
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Re: Bookmarks causing Firefox to hang

Post by dfoulkes »

I'll assume that you're working with this process of bookmark-sorting-experimenting with a test profile or have saved off your default one... if that is so then as a further test for this I would either clear out that (current) test profiles' Places.sqlite file (or better yet, create another test(2) profile), export your "default" bookmarks to an HTML file (if you don't have that one still around), import that file into your test(2) profile and then do some of the functions in that profile that has been causing issues. If viewing/sorting bookmarks in the test(2) profile works to satisfaction then I guess one could say that the "tags" are causing this problem??? ... and maybe there's a bug about that or ??
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Anonymosity
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Re: Bookmarks causing Firefox to hang

Post by Anonymosity »

If you have 4000 bookmarks, I am willing to bet that some of them are not valid. You could use CheckPlaces to check them. It will also find duplicates. Vacuum Places Improved is supposed to help with startup time.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/10897/
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/13878/
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Franadora
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Re: Bookmarks causing Firefox to hang

Post by Franadora »

I wonder if it's the LACK of folder structure that is the problem with the "Unsorted" view. But I'm not familiar with the sqlite structure where bookmarks are stored.

I do assume you have no "Live Bookmarks". They tend to be a big source of hanging.

I found I had over 3100 bookmarks, but many are duplicates. I've been using Checkplaces and other techniques to reduce the duplicates to about 2000 - I may decide to use tags to further reduce that number...
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dartiss
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Re: Bookmarks causing Firefox to hang

Post by dartiss »

Back again... been trying all sorts. At one point I got frustrated to the point of moving to Chrome, but realised my mistake and returned ;)

Ok, yes, removing Live Bookmarks makes some things better. I've also moved my bookmarks out of "Unsorted". However, still, a search within the bookmark organiser will cause a hang of over a minute every time.

When Live Bookmarks were introduced I had a similar number of bookmarks and DIDN'T have this problem - why is it happening now? Importing the same bookmarks into Chrome didn't cause any problems.

I think a bug or general performance issue has been introduced at some point in version 3. Safe mode Firefox has the same problem.
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dfoulkes
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Re: Bookmarks causing Firefox to hang

Post by dfoulkes »

I was curious about some of this...

So, I created a test profile and restored my 800 bookmarks into it... they are broken down in folders though.
So, I did a search of "//" which pretty much displays all my bookmarks.
Then I copied all the "found" bookmarks from that search into the standard unsorted folder... now there were about 800 in there.
I clicked on the Unsorted folder to get all of them in the right-display-pane... did a CTRL A on that list and copied... then pasted back into that Unsorted folder.
I did this enough times to get close to 5000 bookmarks in that folder.
Then I deleted all other folders leaving me with the Unsorted only....

--- What took place while doing all of that was a huge delay in Firefox completing that paste routine towards the end of my pasting... which could be expected as it builds the sql file up. At one time Firefox would not come back so I closed it and when I restarted that test profile up all pasting was complete... with no harm to the files that I could see... but, it looks like FF is a little weak on managing that places.sqlite file... and I suppose that people had to do a balancing act with respect to structure of some files based on averages or ??

Anyway, first test had mostly bookmarks in there "without" tags (I think I may have ended up with about 2-3 hundred BM's containing tags..., once I built that 5k qty. in the unsorted folder I did a "//" search on it and that search completed in about 3 seconds... I then searched for a specific "alpha" set and the results came back in about the same 3 seconds... maybe a little less.

Then I remembered that you're working mainly with tags as your issue/desire.. so, I sorted that 5k-bookmarks folder by tags, deleted all bookmarks without tags (that took about 20 seconds) and then started a procedure of copying/pasting all those tagged bookmarks back into itself in order to build back up to my 5000 "tagged" bookmarks. While doing that building FF came back with a Script not responding and I clicked on continue... but FF never came back to where I could use it... had to close the Bookmarks Org. window and when I did that FF also closed... restarted that test-FF and all the Bookmarks were as I wanted them... 5000 tagged BM's in the Unsorted folder. I did a search of "//" in that folder and it took around 14 seconds to display the 5k of bookmarks... did a specific "alpha" search that found about 200 BM's and that took around 12 seconds... re-did the "//" and that took around 14 seconds again.

I use a Win7, 4gig, dual proc. laptop to do this... and I have a feeling that if I were to get out my old XP laptop with 1gig I would see a huge negative diff. in my results. So, it could very well be that once a qty of bookmarks within a folder gets past a certain qty. the process that handles the searching/sorting of those BM's has a problem... I'm sure that FF also having to manage the additional overhead-tags in some indexing system adds to the problem.

EDIT...
BTW... in restoring the initial HTML file into that test profile did recover what tags I did have in there already.
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Re: Bookmarks causing Firefox to hang

Post by MangoMozilla »

I have noticed similar problems. When I want to load history in the sidebar it sometimes takes up to 10 secs or so. Then when I scroll through it it sometimes hangs for a few seconds as well - the faster I do this the longer it takes. But what bugs me most is that even when going through the bookmarks menu it often stalls for many seconds. Everything is neatly organized in folders but when I scroll from one to the other it doesnt always show the content of that folder (unless Im extremely patient). I probably have about 2000 bookmarks too. And I noticed that the longer I have firefox running the slower things become, including just surfing the web. What gives? I'm running 3.6.13.
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