Comment 55 for bug 215728

Created attachment 318072
strace output of firefox's fsyncs

Here's some data: In 11 minutes of light browsing (I visited perhaps 6 pages), firefox called fsync() 17 times on places.sqlite, 47 (!) times on places.sqlite-journal, and 12 times on other files (one is formhistory.sqlite, the other appear to have been closed already, so I don't know). Total time spent inside fsync system calls: 63 seconds. Longest nonresponsive period: 12.8 seconds.

I've attached the strace log with timestamps and durations. The file descriptors mentioned in it are:

32 /home/mg/.mozilla/firefox/default.a83/places.sqlite
40 /home/mg/.mozilla/firefox/default.a83/formhistory.sqlite
49 /home/mg/.mozilla/firefox/default.a83/places.sqlite-journal
53 54 65 70 already gone from /proc/.../fd/

Strangely enough I had't noticed excessive disk I/O or bouts of nonresponsiveness in Firefox 3.0 beta 4. The data here is collected from beta 5 (the build included in Ubuntu Hardy Heron), where the fsyncs make the browsing excessively painful.