I'm glad to see someone is working on this since it was a very noticable problem for me.
I don't think it will matter what database you use if you're forced to have it hosted over a network. As far as I know they all rely on the underlying locking mechanism in the OS, which is inherently slow over a network. Can you avoid multiple locking latency hits by just getting a lock at startup and never relinquishing it? On 9/13/05, Brett Wilson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > 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 > -- --- The Castles of Dereth Calendar: a tour of the art and architecture of Asheron's Call http://www.lulu.com/content/77264
