Periodic heavy hard disk activity with 3.0 RC1?

MechR · Post by **MechR** » May 18th, 2008, 12:48 pm

Just upgraded from 2.x the other day. Is it just me, or is 3.0 RC1 periodically grinding the hard disk for minutes at a time? Anyone know what that's about? I'm on Windows XP.

On an unrelated note, yay, default mousewheel scrolling behavior now follows the OS setting! No need to set mousewheel.withnokey.action to 1 now for Page Up/Down

night_stalker_z · Post by **night_stalker_z** » May 18th, 2008, 2:17 pm

I think it's updating the malware protection data so it doesn't have to check online each time.

Bluefang · Post by **Bluefang** » May 18th, 2008, 3:18 pm

It could also be updating any of your databases in your profile (history, bookmarks, formhistory, cookies, per-page-settings, etc) during this time as well.

There were also excessive disk usage problems in linux ( https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=430530 ) so maybe something like that has now cropped up on windows?

rickst29 · Post by **rickst29** » May 18th, 2008, 10:13 pm

You're probably experiencing bug 421482... nominated as a blocker for RC2. But it's still unclear-- whether it's mostly the initial creation of the malware/phishing database, or whether it's the Updates, or whether it's one of the places/history databases.

YOU CAN HELP. Please check on night_stalker's guess by changing the pref 'browser.safebrowsing.enabled' from true to false, and see if the "disk grinding" stops. Comment here or (even better) get yourself a bugzilla ID and comment right inside of 421482. One thing which you should post, if you know where your profile folder is, is the current size of all the *.sqlite files in the root directory of your profile.

I contributed some testing on Linux for 430530, but I don't do Windoze....

Diago · Post by **Diago** » May 19th, 2008, 1:23 am

By experimenting with browser.bookmarks.livemark_refresh_seconds (set to 1800 now) the grinding not only happened right after start up of FF, but on each time interval I'd set the pref to. The load or FF responsiveness this grinding had has decreased after I cleaned up a couple of duplicate livemarks yesterday.

I also noticed that when a livemark fails to load (because the feed url changed for example) this seems to take a big hit. Using Boox it also appears as if livemarks are reloaded all at once. If this is done 1 by 1 then the load could be more evenly divided.

So in my case it looks like cleaning up livemarks and verifying that they load correctly helped a lot, but reloading 109 live bookmarks still takes a hit and then FF seems to hang for a few seconds (annoying as I typed this piece of text). Windows and other applications stay responsive though.

Meol · Post by **Meol** » May 19th, 2008, 2:00 am

hehe 109 live bm's that's sure a stress test..
out of curiosity: roughly what kind of system and especially what type of hard drive are you running?

Diago · Post by **Diago** » May 19th, 2008, 2:43 am

T7200@2Ghz/3GB and
HTS721010G9SA00 with Acoustic Management set to Loud (NHC) :biggrin:

Vista and L.Notes stay responsive now that I'm testing with browser.bookmarks.livemark_refresh_seconds set to 60, so the I/O (places or malware/phishing database) caused by FF seems mostly to effect FF itself.

I cannot imagine that I'm the only one using over 100 live BM's. FF added with the right extensions is an excellent feed reader.

mak77 · Post by **mak77** » May 19th, 2008, 3:06 am

the live bookmarks loading all-at-once is a known bug, 109 livemarks are a huge number, the livemarks refresh code needs a review to do loading in chunks, will probably be in 3.1 though (i don't see many users with 100 livemarks actually). so if you have so many you should see the problem on every livemarks reload (15 minutes), you can increase the refresh time to make the problem happen less frequently

Diago · Post by **Diago** » May 19th, 2008, 3:39 am

I found 1800 a good interval between being up to date traversing through the unread articles and doing other things outside FF, but yes with the pref set to 900 FF freezes for some moments every 15 minutes.
Good to see that these are known issues taken care of.

Diago · Post by **Diago** » May 25th, 2008, 3:52 am

Yay! Found HD grinding problem workaround by using Sage-Too.

FF3 is very responsive again even with Sage's (sequential!) feed checks set to every 5 minutes and set on browser startup. Even though I found no evidence on this it also seems to override the pref browser.bookmarks.livemark_refresh_seconds which I set to 120 for testing purposes, no hick ups whatsoever! =D>

Edit: Accept third-party cookies to successfully install extensions from AMO sandbox.

MonztA51 · Post by **MonztA51** » May 25th, 2008, 6:12 am

http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=653932

MrMystery · Post by **MrMystery** » May 25th, 2008, 1:04 pm

Is there no way to simply stop Firefox checking for updates at startup?

night_stalker_z · Post by **night_stalker_z** » May 25th, 2008, 3:20 pm

Tools > Options > Advanced > Updates.

MrMystery · Post by **MrMystery** » May 25th, 2008, 3:55 pm

Sorry, I meant is there any way of preventing Fx from checking for Live Bookmark updates

RazorBoy · Post by **RazorBoy** » May 27th, 2008, 12:57 pm

rickst29 wrote:You're probably experiencing bug 421482... nominated as a blocker for RC2. But it's still unclear-- whether it's mostly the initial creation of the malware/phishing database, or whether it's the Updates, or whether it's one of the places/history databases.

YOU CAN HELP. Please check on night_stalker's guess by changing the pref 'browser.safebrowsing.enabled' from true to false, and see if the "disk grinding" stops. Comment here or (even better) get yourself a bugzilla ID and comment right inside of 421482. One thing which you should post, if you know where your profile folder is, is the current size of all the *.sqlite files in the root directory of your profile.

I contributed some testing on Linux for 430530, but I don't do Windoze....

Diago wrote:By experimenting with browser.bookmarks.livemark_refresh_seconds (set to 1800 now) the grinding not only happened right after start up of FF, but on each time interval I'd set the pref to. The load or FF responsiveness this grinding had has decreased after I cleaned up a couple of duplicate livemarks yesterday.

I also noticed that when a livemark fails to load (because the feed url changed for example) this seems to take a big hit. Using Boox it also appears as if livemarks are reloaded all at once. If this is done 1 by 1 then the load could be more evenly divided.

So in my case it looks like cleaning up livemarks and verifying that they load correctly helped a lot, but reloading 109 live bookmarks still takes a hit and then FF seems to hang for a few seconds (annoying as I typed this piece of text). Windows and other applications stay responsive though.

Wow. I'm experiencing the same problems. I read another post that said you should also shut off the phishing filter and the malicious site filter. How would you do that, anyway? I can't find them anywhere in about:config.