On 10/03/12 03:29 pm, Felix Miata thus wrote :
> On 2012-10-03 11:11 (GMT-0500) Dave Saville composed:
>
>> Before the compressing I had tried just deleting the thing but it
>> bounces back at 10MB. How the heck can a database with nothing in it
>> take up 10MB?
>
> I don't know, and I didn't look any of this up. Call it educated
> speculation of you wish, only because you kept asking.
>
> I think it works like a swap file, except you don't get to enforce it's
> initial or minimum size via CONFIG.SYS. It's there whether or not it's
> ever actually needed. For efficiency reasons FF probably wants to be
> contiguous and write specific portions of the file instead of the whole
> file as changes get made, like any competent paging system, and like
> database files. On OS2/eCS maybe it isn't afforded an opportunity via OS
> or disk driver or missing or broken OS-specific code to write less than
> the whole file. It may have an about:config entry to override the
> default size, while 10M may be the minimum it'll obey.
Steve's links were quite interesting. It's good to know that we're not
the only ones who think that 10MB for an essentially empty file is a bit
excessive. I think one of the bugs I hit on while scanning included a
proposal for just what you mention, Felix: the ability to trim the
default/starting size of places.sqlite via a pref. Unfortunately, I
don't see that implemented as yet.
Dave, you might want to check your prefs for:
sqlite_opt.reindex_on_exit
and
sqlite_opt.auto_reindex_per_browser_close
Perhaps your shutdown issue is related to FF trying to reindex the file
and having trouble (though if you've already deleted it and had it
rebuild from scratch, I would be hard pressed to speculate as to what
could cause such apparently consistent behavior other than some failing
hardware).
Just another thought to throw into the mix.
Cheers/2