Firefox, progress

So, I used procmon to see what Firefox was doing when it was taking 60 seconds to start up, and it was reading a lot of files from a lot of different locations.  The one that caught my eye was C:\Documents and Settings\me\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files, and a quick check revealed I had over 7000 files in there.  Not from Firefox, but from programmes which use the IE engine to display web pages and html content (like, XFire).  I removed them all, and the startup times for Firefox dropped to about 15-20 seconds.

Then a friend sent me this link from LifeHacker.

So, not only do I now know what is causing the slowdown, I know why, and I know it’s classed as a bug.

False positive …

Firefox is still slow, it wasn’t (just) Adblock plus.  I’ve even tried with a totally clean profile and it can still take 60 seconds to launch.  If Firefox was the last thing I shut down (say last thing at night) then it opens instantly even if it’s 12 hours later (like first thing in the morning).  However, if anything else (reasonably significant) is run in-between then it takes an age.

Investigation continues.

Sorry

Sorry about the poor performance of this site over the last few days, you may have had timeouts or the page loading without any style sheets, or just taking an absolute age to actually show up.

My web host (Gradwell) is once again suffering major performance issues on it’s shared hosting platform and so far, hasn’t commented on the problem ticket I raised yesterday.

The poor performance is most apparent between 2pm and 7pm (UK time) so if you have trouble then, try again earlier or later and hopefully this will get resolved next week.

Thanks for your patience.