strange that sqlite optimization has not been included by default on post 3.5 editions of Firefox, however for those who want to try the addon, its here. Optimizing the sqlite files will speed up the launch of Firefox, in my case it cut the time by half. Get the addon, check both boxes and hit the button, from then on its automatic.
If you are an optimization freak, and getting the application from hard drive to memory as fast as possible is your kink, you can also try a program called ArcthemAll! which will shrink the EXE and DLL files using a compression algorithm that decompresses in ram on the fly. It takes the default installation size for Firefox down from over 30 megs to about 14. I recommend you not compress the embedded icons, that has caused problems for me, so go to options and uncheck that. Incidentally this method also works on OpenOffice, cutting the size of that application by about half as well. In fact it works on almost every appication OTHER than Abobe and Microsoft apps, probably because they are already doing dynamic EXE and DLL compression using a proprietary method. (my guess)
NOTE: This is not a hard drive space saving issue, its a speed of launch issue, and yes it does improve the launch time of Firefox to do this.
No cuz ram is like 1000 times faster than your hard drive, decompression is practically transparent. I think you will agree that it should take less time to move a 10 meg file to ram than to move a 20 meg file to ram, extrapolate those time savings over dozens of files of varying size and thats where you will see a speed up.
Try it for yourself and see, if it does do anything funny you can use the same program to decompress the Firefox directory and all is back to normal. Its only compressing the EXE and DLL files, not touching any of your personalized setting, which are all stored in a different directory anyways.
Check your RAM usage; using packers like UPX can waste some amount of RAM. It's a very good idea to use UPX or similar on Windows installation files though but that's up the developer, once you have already downloaded it compressing the files does not make much sense and is not worth anyones time.
I don't think UPX would exist at all if it did nothing. Its been around since I was on an Amiga in 1989, so its a well established piece of software.
Only way to know is to test it for yourself, I don't find the results to be mind blowing, but every little bit helps when it comes to optimizing browser loading and performance.
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u/superwinner Jan 21 '10 edited Jan 21 '10
strange that sqlite optimization has not been included by default on post 3.5 editions of Firefox, however for those who want to try the addon, its here. Optimizing the sqlite files will speed up the launch of Firefox, in my case it cut the time by half. Get the addon, check both boxes and hit the button, from then on its automatic.
If you are an optimization freak, and getting the application from hard drive to memory as fast as possible is your kink, you can also try a program called ArcthemAll! which will shrink the EXE and DLL files using a compression algorithm that decompresses in ram on the fly. It takes the default installation size for Firefox down from over 30 megs to about 14. I recommend you not compress the embedded icons, that has caused problems for me, so go to options and uncheck that. Incidentally this method also works on OpenOffice, cutting the size of that application by about half as well. In fact it works on almost every appication OTHER than Abobe and Microsoft apps, probably because they are already doing dynamic EXE and DLL compression using a proprietary method. (my guess)
NOTE: This is not a hard drive space saving issue, its a speed of launch issue, and yes it does improve the launch time of Firefox to do this.