A few days ago I marked an article to read later and I finally read it. It’s about how to Vacuum your Firefox databases for better performance.

According the post, “since Firefox 3.0, bookmarks, history and most storage is kept in SQLite databases”. So, optimize this databases is very healthy to Firefox.

And it’s very easy to do. On Ubuntu (I did on 9.04) install the sqlite3 package. Open the terminal and type:

sudo aptitude install sqlite3

After, still in terminal, access your Firefox profile folder:

cd ~/.mozilla/firefox/something_weird.default

In my computer, this something_weird.default is 73cm0ffy.default.

You can see many .sqlite files inside this folder, these are the database to optimize. To do this, close Firefox (only after read or copy this post :P ), then type, for each file:

sqlite3 file_name.sqlite vacuum

And there’s a way to vacuum all the files at once? Sure. You’re using a Linux terminal! To do this, type:

for i in *.sqlite; do sqlite3 $i vacuum; done

And done.