Hi everyone,

I was seeing really, really poor performance from Firefox. I'm not sure exactly when it started being a problem, but it was going on for at least a week and I certainly saw it with Firefox 12 (in F17 x86_64).

I thought I would try moving my profile out of the way to see if performance would improve, so I shut down Firefox and moved ~/.mozilla/firefox/*.default somewhere else. But then when I tried to restart Firefox, it said that it was already running but not responding. Clearly moving the *.default directory isn't the way to go.

So I then put it back where it had been and instead moved all of ~/.mozilla/firefox out of the way. After doing that, I was able to restart Firefox, and indeed performance was much better.

Having confirmed that, I deleted the newly created ~/.mozilla/firefox and moved the only one back into place so that I could try disabling extensions, etc. bit by bit to identify the culprit. But when I then restarted Firefox, the performance problems were gone!

In short, somehow moving either ~/.mozilla/firefox/*.default or ~/.mozilla/firefox out of the way temporarily and then putting it back seems to have somehow cured the performance issue. I don't understand why that might be and think it's rather odd, and I'm not sure how I'd even begin to bugzilla it. Does anybody have any thoughts? Is anyone else seeing anything like this?

 jik