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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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To: athena10@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


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