I don’t know about any of you loyal Firefox users, but I had run into a problem recently, and only now discovered how to ’solve’ it. The problem was an odd one: Saving something to disk took waaaaay too long to get underway, like, you’d click a link to something and save it, and then it would take upwards of 30 seconds for it to respond afterwards, just spinning the system. It was a part of the main UI thread I’m guessing, since sometimes the download would complete before FF would respond again.

Anyway, I always have a few things running that I put up as ante against the problem, some software that’s always running playing with my disk *cough*, oh, and my USB drive which I’m never sure if it’s causing problems.

I didn’t really discover the problem until recently, but it acted like it crept up on me, but certainly it occured after installing Firefox 1.5. Anyway, I finally figured out, possibly, what it was.

I never clean out my Downloads window, I tend to just close it. It had, after all the time I’ve used firefox (I think it ported the history from previous versions) gotten so large that adding a new entry to it brought the system down to it’s knees. I had disconnected the USB, closed down everything else and saw it was still happening, so on a whim I clicked the cleanup button… then it took entirely too long to clean up, and then blamo, everything downloads insta-like again.

A lesson kids, always implement such frivolous features as a bounded queue (maybe it already is, maybe my computer just sucks)

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