On Fri, 4 Jul 2008, Stephan Wiesand wrote:

...
> And the consequences of having an sqlite DB in ~/.mozilla - which is 
> fsync'ed several times per web page loaded - could be quite serious for 
> sites with ~ in NFS or (especially) AFS.
...

Just to complete the loop on this the RH bugzilla entry about the sqlite 
fsync stuff is currently marked 'closed fixed in currentrelease':

   https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=449113

It refers off to http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=421482 which 
says (in part):

   With Firefox 3 (>= rc2) you could just tell your users to go to
   about:config and set toolkit.storage.synchronous to integer value 0
   which will have nearly the same effect (it will set SYNCHRONOUS pragma to OFF to
   all databases after restart).

I'm pretty sure that we arn't overriding this but with firefox-3.0.1-1.el5 
rpm it already shows up in about:config as 0 (and that being the default), 
so at least the performance aspects seem to be cured now.

I've been lightly testing ffox-3.0.1 for a few days and so far the sqlite 
databases don't seem to have grown *too* big, so that profile is ~3.5M so 
far which I can probably live with - though I may still need to exclude 
any which are changing too frequently from our more frequent sets of 
backups...

  -- Jon