Our beloved and well known friend and companion Firefox can be quite slow – especially if you are having it for a while now. But what is the reason for that performance loss? Let’s investigate and see what we can do. Due to the fact that I am running it on my laptop being on different locations, I can be sure that it is not a matter of the DSL-Provider. As it was fast the first days, it surely has got to do with changing data like cookies, bookmarks and all that jazz.

Regarding the Internet Explorer we know that it messes around with files. But Firefox?

Firefox uses a portable database named SQLite – with all the advantages and disadvantages of a database like fragmentation over time which is a huge issue regarding performance. As I am running Linux, it isn’t a big deal to get the sqlite3 tools ready for getting our hands dirty. What we need to do is to vacuum the database files first which would work like that:

sqlite3 mydatabase.sqlite vacuum

But getting our hands on any sqlite file of Firefox can be quite much work – so let’s use find for making it simple:

find ~/.mozilla -name ‘*.sqlite’ -print -exec sqlite3 {} VACUUM \;

As we are kind database administrators – we are messing around with the sqlite datafiles anyways – we can also reindex the databases which shouldn’t be a bad thing too:

find ~/.mozilla -name ‘*.sqlite’ -print -exec sqlite3 {} REINDEX \;

After this short treatment the browser is at speedy as at the first days again. So much about Love, Care and Understanding…