Leading on from yesterday’s article covering the release of Firefox 8 on the Aurora channel I mentioned a potential way for you to restore performance in existing installation of Firefox which has become sluggish. In the case where performance has been lost as a result of bloated and fragmented SQLITE database files (which is where addons generally store their data as well as test components in the beta releases). Fragmentation is often the enemy of performance particularly in file systems where the use of a defrag utility is required (either the one that comes with Windows or a third party solution).
Unfortunately, Firefox comes with no means to keep these SQLITE files in optimum condition leading to gradually slower performance over time unless you delete the files but you lose your data in the process.
So what can you do?
SpeedyFox
There’s a great little utility called SpeedyFox which you can use to defrag and compact the SQLITE files. Before running it, make sure you close Firefox first so it can go about its business. It might take a couple of minutes (or up to any hour according to the website) depending on how badly fragmented the SQLITE files are and the speed of your computer. Once done you can fire up Firefox again (or have SpeedyFox do it for you automatically) and see if it has made any difference.
Bear in mind, this utility will only correct performance issues as a result of fragmented SQL files and will do nothing for resource hungry addons or corruption of the browser.
If you want to try SpeedyFox, you can grab it here for Windows and Mac.
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