Firefox "auto-complete" is very slow

Posted by netvope on Super User See other posts from Super User or by netvope
Published on 2010-01-30T07:35:10Z Indexed on 2010/04/05 2:13 UTC
Read the original article Hit count: 483

Filed under:

firefox

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autocomplete

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slow

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sqlite

Firefox version: 3.6

My places.sqlite is rather big (114MB, after being optimized by SpeedyFox.) If I turn on auto-complete, it may take 1 or 2 seconds for Firefox to accept a newly typed URL. To reproduce the issue:

Type a URL into the URL bar, press enter.
Nothing happens, and Firefox consumes 100% CPU (actually 50% of 2 cores) for 1 to 2 seconds
Then Firefox start the network connection and load the webpage.

Since it consumes 100% CPU, I don't think the bottleneck is the disk. I have some experience with SQLite and I know a 100MB DB is very small. To achieve the delay Firefox must be doing some expensive processing or inefficient queries.

The issue does not appear if:

auto-complete is turned off, or
the URL is frequently used, or
a new profile with no history is used

Does anyone have any idea how to solve the problem? Should I file this as a bug? I don't want to give up my 100MB history, but I don't want to give up auto-complete either :)

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