Hi everybody, I'm working on replacing a lot of Firefox's storage systems to use sqlite. It has been going well so far except for one issue.
The database file is stored in the user's Mozilla profile directory. In companies and Universities using Linux, this directory is often hosted over the network. In these cases, sqlite performance can be quite poor. I am aware that writing performance can be bad in these cases, but we don't do too many writes. I am mostly concerned about read performance, since a lot of this stuff (history, bookmarks) drive the UI. The lag, even over a fast network, can be noticable. I am also concerned about file locking, since the documentation does not recommend using files over the network. Can anybody suggest what to do about this problem? This is not something that can be avoided, since some people will have this configuration and will not have any say about it. Firefox must perform reasonably in these cases. One thing that could work in our favor is that Mozilla already does locking on the profile, so access will be restricted to our one process. Is there anything that we can do to take advantage of this to avoid having to query the file for reads even when the content is cached? It looks like we will have multiple database connections from this process. I will work on minimizing the number of queries in the common cases, but any little bit of perfomance will help here. Thanks, Brett
