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history file slowing FF

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  • Last reply by BreezyOhio

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Firefox has been getting slower to load pages,etc. In an effort to troubleshoot it I deleted histories and now it's zippy fast again. Happy ending, right? My history file had to gigantic .. perhaps it was mildly corrupt, but I think this was just the natural offshoot of using FF every day, all day for over a year on the same profile. BTW, in the past I had created new profiles to solves this very same problem.


I hate to lose my entire history though. I wish there was an option to define how long history was kept, say something like a week or a month a year or forever. Perhaps this would keep the history file small and help with the speed issues that everyone has from time to time.

Firefox has been getting slower to load pages,etc. In an effort to troubleshoot it I deleted histories and now it's zippy fast again. Happy ending, right? My history file had to gigantic .. perhaps it was mildly corrupt, but I think this was just the natural offshoot of using FF every day, all day for over a year on the same profile. BTW, in the past I had created new profiles to solves this very same problem. I hate to lose my entire history though. I wish there was an option to define how long history was kept, say something like a week or a month a year or forever. Perhaps this would keep the history file small and help with the speed issues that everyone has from time to time.

Chosen solution

Firefox increases the places.sqlite file in chunks of 10 MB to prevent too much file fragmentation.

If you didn't delete the places.sqlite file, but merely deleted the history in Firefox then the file size hasn't changed.

Do you know what the size of the places.sqlite file was when you had the problems?


You can try to check and repair the places database with this extension if there are problems.

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Firefox increases the places.sqlite file in chunks of 10 MB to prevent too much file fragmentation.

If you didn't delete the places.sqlite file, but merely deleted the history in Firefox then the file size hasn't changed.

Do you know what the size of the places.sqlite file was when you had the problems?


You can try to check and repair the places database with this extension if there are problems.

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Thanks very much for turning me on to this! I cannot tell you how many times I created new profiles, etc to "clean up FF. This add on will save me tons of effort in the future and should be part of FF in the options form. Maybe add a "maintenance" tab and put these and other options in it.

In the end I chose Places Cleaner because it has a UI and I can control it. I couldn't find a UI for the places-maintenance add on.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/placescleaner/reviews/?src=api

Again thanks much!!!!