How to Make Flock Faster

Image via Wikipedia

I use Flock. One reason is that some plugins I would have to install are built in. Another is that Flock doesn’t use Live Bookmarks. The last time I checked, you couldn’t shut these off in Firefox. This post should show you how to make it run a bit faster.

So if you bookmark a site in Firefox and the site happens to have a feed, it’s coming along whether you like it or not. And Firefox will periodically update the feed at the expense of performance.

While it probably doesn’t cost much, but there is still the principle of running the process when you don’t even use Firefox as a feed reader. A lot of Firefox users think Live Bookmarks should be an addon instead of part of Firefox because of this reason.

When I installed Flock, it pulled all of my profile data from Firefox. This was about a year ago. And that Firefox profile had moved with me from another computer. MozBackup is handy for that.

The thing about all this moving is that you pull the crap along with you and the size of your profile grows.

Another thing is that no one really tells you that this can slow your browser down. Most of the “speed up your browser†posts tell you type “about:config†in your address bar and screw with the settings.

I am not going to tell you that. It never did much for my system. Plus this should be the job of addons, to make settings more user friendly.

What happened to me was I decided to upgrade Flock to the newest version, Flock’s answer to Firefox 3. And I did. And it crashed out of the gate every time. So I ran it in safe mode. And it crashed out of the gate every time.

So I look for help and am told to delete my whole profile. What? There is stuff in there. I keep notes. I wasn’t settling for that one. There is something about losing data I don’t like. Some people invest in gold. I have data.

So, in other words, it was possibly time to chase a wild goose. But I was stuck.

Step 1: Delete the Lucene folder

When you search in Flock, it remembers searches and sites you have been to and gives you a drop down related to what you are typing in. I have hardly used this feature. The index for it is stored in the Lucene folder. Mine was 4 GB, :P. Details

Step 2: Make sure the Lucene folder stops rebuilding

Like I said, I didn’t use this feature. And when it builds this quickly (I am here on the internet a lot), I did not want it. You can shut this off and I did. And yes, it does involve using “about:configâ€. So I lied. Details

Step 3: Delete old feed data

This may not be an issue with some of you, but I moved my profile from Firefox and used Live Bookmarks at one time. And that resulted in a feedcontent.sqlite file that was 2 GB. And after I was done with Live Bookmarks, it just hung out. So I deleted that one. It is located is the same folder as the Lucene folder. See step 1.

Step 4: Max out your connections

This part will work with both Flock and Firefox. I found a bunch of information about speeding up Flock/Firefox here in both the post and comments.

Here are two addons that will hopefully give you a few more pipes suck information from the internet and give you more speed. I tested both plugins before and after by opening 100 tabs. And yes it does help, a lot. I have FasterFox running on my Firefox installation and Tweak Network Settings on Flock.

Tweak Network Settings

FasterFox