I have been using the Standard PortableApps.com Suite for more than two years and have been VERY pleased. I regularly use Portable Thunderbird, with the Lightning addon, Portable Firefox, and I added RoboForm2Go and a diary program to create a great portable "office". I even created a batch file to open all four programs, converted it to an executable, and added it the PortableApps menu.
For the past few months I've been having problems and believe I've narrowed it down to Portable Firefox.
Initially when I start all four programs everything works fine for the first few minutes then I experience allot of slow responses from Thunderbird or Firefox. Nothing crashes, just long 30 second pauses before Thunderbird goes to the folder I selected or Firefox loads the page I requested.
The only think I can attribute it to is Firefox's memory usage. I experience the problem when the usage gets to ~130,000 K or higher. Here's a list of what I've tried so far:
1. First, never had this problem six or more months ago with an older version of Firefox loaded on my original USB drive.
2. Stopped using the "batch file" and opened each program individually from the PortableApps menu.
3. Updated to the latest stable version of Firefox and Thuderbird.
4. Updated to Firefox 3.6 Beta 5.
5. Installed the Protableapps.com Suite on two differnet USB drives.
6. Used both USB drives on several different Windows (XP/Vista) PCs
7. Removed all Firefox and Thunderbird addons including Lightning.
8. Installed the recommended "RAMback" extension.
9. Edited about:config with recommended "memory leak" settings.
10. Keeping my tabbed browsing down to only one tab.
So far the only "work-around" is to shut down PortableFirefox and run Firefox from my local hard drive. With the other three programs running, PortableAppsPlatform, and any other portableapp, including ClamWin AV updating and scanning the USB drive, everything responds at normal speeds.
Last bit of data...The USB drives I'm using are the SanDisk Cruzer Titanium 2.0GB and 8.0GB. The 2.0 is the original drive I've used for several years.
Any ideas or recommendations would be appreciated?
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I've been using Firefox Portable on my Thumbdrive for a couple of years now & I started having slowdown problems as well. It got so bad that it would take a minute or two for a simple amount of text to appear on-screen & I started considering switching to Chrome permanently. HOWEVER, I looked into it & found a fix that might work for you.
Source: http://www.solidblogger.com/firefox-addons-for-sqlite-database-defragmen...
Firefox's SQLite Database occasionally gets fragmented with use & it can drag performance. However, once you clean up the SQLite Database, Firefox should perk back up.
There's a add-on to Firefox called Vacuum Places ( https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/13878 ) that can remind you to clean up the SQLite Database (with an icon in Firefox's status bar) OR even automate the process for you.
If you won't want to deal with add-ons or want to do it manually, here's the steps to take.
1) Open up the Error Console (Tools -> Error Console)
2) Copy the following code:
Components.classes["@mozilla.org/browser/nav-history-service;1"].getService(Components.interfaces.nsPIPlacesDatabase).DBConnection.executeSimpleSQL(”VACUUM”);
NOTE: There are no line breaks in the code (should be one long line), forum formatting forced the break.
3) Paste in the code box & hit "evaluate"
4) Give it some time to for the code to do it's work (about 30-60 seconds).
That's it. You may need to reboot Firefox to see the full effects, but that should fix your slowdown problems!
~TStodden
Game Monkey Likes You!
I believe the issue was with Roboform's adapter/plugin.
I tried your suggestion TSsodden but had no luck with "vacuuming" the SQLite Datebase.
Once I installed Firefox 3.5.7 I lost my RoboForm Toolbar on Firefox. The up side is everything with Firefox started working at a normal pace. So I downloaded and installed RoboForms latest Firefox XPI file. At this time I still have normal page loading times AND the RoboForm tool bar is available on the browser.