Comment 21 for bug 229745

Today, I tried to catch what was going on in my ~/.mozilla/firefox/<something> while there was loss of responsiveness and audible/visible disk I/O.

It appears that places.sqlite-journal is being emptied and filled alternately. This is an extract with timestamps for these two files over time from successive ls -altr commands:

===================
0 2008-07-01 00:18 places.sqlite-journal
12894208 2008-07-01 00:18 places.sqlite

12894208 2008-07-01 00:18 places.sqlite
98488 2008-07-01 00:18 places.sqlite-journal

0 2008-07-01 00:18 places.sqlite-journal
12894208 2008-07-01 00:18 places.sqlite

0 2008-07-01 00:18 places.sqlite-journal
12894208 2008-07-01 00:18 places.sqlite

0 2008-07-01 00:18 places.sqlite-journal
12894208 2008-07-01 00:18 places.sqlite

0 2008-07-01 00:18 places.sqlite-journal
12894208 2008-07-01 00:18 places.sqlite

12894208 2008-07-01 00:18 places.sqlite
143632 2008-07-01 00:18 places.sqlite-journal

0 2008-07-01 00:18 places.sqlite-journal
12894208 2008-07-01 00:18 places.sqlite

===================

It appears that places.sqlite-journal is oscillating in size on disk while places.sqlite does not get changed. The initial and final sizes on disk for these two files are the same.

What is all the disk I/O resulting in?

If it is nothing (initial and final file sizes are the same), why is it happening at all?

Can anyone throw any light on what is going on?

Should I be watching other files?

Is this a result of the "awesome bar" feature?

Or could it be an addon that is causing this?

I really wish for a speedy resolution.

Thanks.