Firefox bugging and more

Well, I return to blogging after a long time and this one is on a request from  one of the very few people who bother to read the crap here  And this mostly-plagiarized post is, perhaps unfittingly,  dedicated to him and the good times and long bulla-sessions, we have had on IITK campus. It has indeed been an honour to know you GS

So, first I reveal a small trick which I found out today. Not a great discovery but a very useful one. My /home partition drive suddenly swelled to 100% and I was clueless as to what happened. It took help from another friend to figure out to use the du command to understand where has the space been consumed. But, the question was which flags and options to be used along with it. And, I think I have found out a pretty decent way to do that. Here’s the command:

bash$ du -h --time --max-depth=1 --time-style=full-iso /.../sample_dir

Let me briefly describe what this does. It outputs the hard-disk size, modification date and time of all the sub-directories at first hierarchical level inside the directory sample_dir. The file-sizes are in easy-to-understand units In this way, you can figure out which directory looks suspicious by its file-size and then go on to inspect that particular sub-directory. Ofcourse, I succeeded in finding that out the culprit Adobe Acrobat (~/.adobe/Acrobat/), which swelled to around 6.5 GB (it’s not a typo ), mainly due to simple word searches in an e-book and such things :O:O

Next is somewhat more common problem and something that took me around 1.5 years to figure out — the pain that Firefox causes when you have something around 30-40 tabs opened and surf for atleast around 12 hours a day :D I continued with it for want of a better browser and could hardly find one which seemed more convincing and also easy to install. Many of my “Windows-friends” insist that I should simply give up on Linux and start using Windows. Sample this:

A windows devotee: well agar tu windows use karta toh problem hi nahi hoti
me (cutting him short): toh main 1-1.5 saal mein bhi nahi jaan paata ki problem kya hai. infact yeah u r rt … main actually kabhi yeh sense hi nahi kar paata ki thr is a problem :D

I confess I’m not that big a nerd to be knowing the details of either Windows or Linux well, but a priori it seems to me that Linux is the choice to go for, anyday Anyways, so firefox would take hell lot of time to start and also become unresponsive quite frequently. On my tweaking-spree today, I decided to check the file-size change that happens to ~/.mozilla just like ~/.adobe, when one is using Firefox and I again found out its size to be somewhat larger than expected. In particular, I located 2 files places.sqlite and urlclassifier3.sqlite (I’m using Firefox 3.0.10 presently), which seemed to be of uncharacteristically large size; 35 and 33 MBs respectively. I googled up and after reading similar rantings on few forums landed up on this gentleman’s page. What he tells is that, to the best of my understanding, there is pretty appreciable amount of web-garbage that accumulates in those 2 files, over time. And it contributes towards slowing firefox down. The way to circumvent this problem, whenever it begins to rear its ugly head, is to close your firefox and clean these files up. Close down your firefox (else it locks these files). From your command line access, navigate to the directory which is your firefox profile and do the following there.

bash$ for z in `ls *.sqlite`; do sqlite3 $z VACUUM; done

And for those who surf heavily like me, if still your places.sqlite is quite large, do the following:

bash$ sqlite3 places.sqlite
SQLite version 3.5.9
Enter ".help" for instructions
sqlite> delete from moz_places where hidden=1 and url like 'http%';
sqlite> .quit
bash$

This shall remove all the old URL addresses that you haven’t used at all in the recent past and shall further purge the file. For me, it reduced the size of ~/.mozilla by around 12 MB.

Most of this post is, as always, for personal reference and I claim no originality whatsoever.

Signing off,

P.S.: I’m yet to figure out how to make Flash and videos work in firefox :(:(