I know there are several posts about this, but no-one seems to be describing the problem I now have. Not got the fastest USB so I had got FF2 working pretty well with session restore off and all the others mentioned.
Decided to try FF3 and it was v slow. Again tried all the tweaks and no improvement. Most problem was that after a page loads (any page, even one you go back one step to) lots of writing (5 secs after page loads and then writes for 15 secs) which freezes FF and most other apps on USB drive.
OK, go back to FF2 which now does exactly the same. I have added the tweaks, delete and installed from scratch, deleted and replaced with back up from less than a week ago, re-tweaked everything but the 15 secs of write still happens.
Anyone any bright ideas - FF3 seems to have scuttled me! Even posting this was frustrating!
Guy
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Maybe you already verified this, but just to make sure
Do you use the history and anti-phishing features ? These create a lot of writing on the USB drive, especially the new anti-phishing feature (the sqlite database can be up to 50MB D: ).
Hi
Just a quick message to say that yesterday I switched off the anti-phishing feature through tools | options as recommended.
Today the feature is still 'disabled' but today Firefox is still dead slow and still writing those .sqlite files, 15 Mb and counting today.
Before I realised this I thought at one point Portable Apps had frozen and pulled out the USB stick in frustration. I got a message to say that some of the '...sqlite' data that was being written may have been lost.
Gotta go ... ciao
So yes everything is as it should be for best performance and FF2 still running like a dog and doing lots of writing every page. Sounds like I have DougM's disease.
... back from watching Spain beat Russia 3-0, great game.
My hunch is that the reason that the Firefox anti-phishing feature continued running in Firefox Portable despite disabling it, was that I had also run my desktop installation of Firefox in which anti-phishing was still enabled, and that the 'anti-phishing enabled' setting carried over to Firefox Portable when I later ran that.
I have now tried disabling anti-phishing on my desktop Firefox installation as well. As a result my portable Firefox installation does now seem to run fairly smoothly. I haven't had the time (or inclination after several celebratory glasses of Spanish cider) to try this 'scientifically' yet so it's still a hunch.
(Both my desktop and portable Firefoxes are 3.0)
Doug
Interesting thought - like the logic. However, I do not have desktop FF of any version. FF2P on USBDrv was working perfectly and fast (I had to put all the tweaks in a few months ago) until I upgraded to FF3P and found it too slow, deleted it and then put FF2P back onto USBDrv and had this post load writing ever since.
Mystery!
Guy
I have a desktop and portable installation of Firefox 3.0
Anti-phishing is activated on the desktop version and it's not on the portable one. Obviously the portable version is not as fast as the desktop one, but I find it as much responsive as the version 2.0.0.14.
I'm adding my .03 here because of the thread title.
I'm using a "new twist" to get FFP performance.
I downloaded RRamdisk, set up a 256MB "fixed disk" ramdrive, and pointed my cache/temp files/cookies/etc to there.
It's super-fast and is gone on reboot...
(IE is also pointed there too)