I'm seeing a performance problem on certain sites (like gmail) which clearing the history should not affect. Is this a website problem or a firefox problem and what can i do to fix it w/o clearing my history? Also as a webdeveloper i am interested in how to make this happen (or not happen).

I'm using firefox 8 and i confirmed the problem by copying my profile to firefox 11 (portable).

To reproduce go to gmail.com and sign in. Have your task manager open. Once you click signin or hit enter gmail will bring up your emails. Keep your eye on the CPU usage.

I checked and right now on this machine its using all my CPU for 22seconds!!!! Yes. 22 seconds.

Once i cleared my "browser & download history" Its <6seconds. WTF. I have no idea why or how the size of history and CPU usage when loading up gmail are correlated. I have firefox setup so it never clears the history. But... 22seconds is a disaster. Can someone explain why this is happening or a fix that isnt clearing my history?

I tried visiting a few websites and only gmail eats up that much CPU. Most websites only take <5sec of max CPU. So maybe this is a gmail problem? Or a firefox problem that gmail happens to hit? I still dont understand why it happens.

-edit- I forgot to mention places.sqlite is 90mb. I dont think that matters. I have a sqlite file 400mb which is pretty much 2 large tables. It has no performance issues