[299] in athena10
AFS storebehind helps firefox
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Kenneth Charles Arnold)
Wed Jul 2 23:02:24 2008
Message-ID: <486C4114.4060504@mit.edu>
Date: Wed, 02 Jul 2008 23:01:40 -0400
From: Kenneth Charles Arnold <kcarnold@MIT.EDU>
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I noticed that Firefox gets pretty laggy with an AFS home directory
sometimes. The culprit seems to be the new sqlite stores: any operation
requires a test on the existence of a .sqlite-journal file (e.g.,
cookies.sqlite-journal), creating it, opening it, and unlinking it.
That's a bunch of AFS server round-trips.
I tried: fs storebehind -allfiles 1024 -verbose
That seemed to speed it up a lot. Best would be to apply that setting
only to Firefox, but it doesn't seem to inherit on directories, even to
newly created files.
Another possible option is to mount a tmpfs on top of .mozilla/firefox
and sync it back on close / periodically. That would also address the
stale lock issue. But both that and the current system potentially lose
bookmarks and other settings changes, since Fx isn't designed to be run
out of the same profile directory multiple times. The only solution I
see is a bookmarks/settings sync server, like Foxmarks (which I use) or
Weave. Or am I missing something?
-Ken