In my 1:1 with Mark I talked about how I was a little concerned that
(AFAIK) we hadn't tried to run Mentat at a scale equivalent to a user's
Places database (I had also mentioned this a few times to various others).
Eventually, if mentat is to actually be the way forward for synced storage
in Firefox, this seems necessary, and it would be good to find problems
sooner and not later.

I wrote some hacky code to stuff a representative set of the
`places.sqlite` data (the relevant-looking fields in your visit and place
info) into the mentat DB this evening. You can find the code here
https://github.com/thomcc/mentat-places-test, and if you have a rust dev
environment setup it should be usable. The README explains somewhat how to
use it at the start.

I wrote a lot more details in the README, but the TLDR is that my findings
were mixed. The performance is not very good, but it also wasn't so bad as
to be unusable on a good machine. That said, I accidentally destroyed my
places.sqlite while writing this code though, so I only had a subset of my
history to test on.

Caveat 1: The code is hacky and doesn't handle errors robustly. It may or
may not work for you. Ask me on IRC, file a bug, or reply if it doesn't.
That said, it's connection to places is readonly, so your history/bookmarks
shouldn't be at any risk.

Caveat 2: I did this mostly out of curiosity. I also likely don't really
know how to use mentat properly, so they should be taken with a grain of
salt. Someone who knew what they were doing would probably get better
numbers, but IDK how much better. I'm skeptical it would compare favorably
to the current system, but it also might not need to.

Anyway, thanks,
Thom Chiovoloni
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