Firefox dropping sessions - running out of space?
This has been going on for a few months, but I have a strange bug where Firefox will start instantly closing sessions. If I clear my cookies it will fix the issue temporarily, but a couple days later it will come back. It's almost like it's running out of space in one of my local .sqlite caches. I've particularly noticed that this happens for a specific domain where I regularly access lots of subdomains (100+ subdomains of a single domain) - it might be coincidental, but I thought that there might be some single-domain cookie storage limit, but from what I've read that limit should be very large and none of the stored cookies are very large and I don't seem to be having this issue in Chrome which - as far as I can tell - has the same single-domain cookie storage limit. Is there a limit to the number of cookies that it will store for a single domain (across subdomains)? Any insight would be much appreciated!
All Replies (7)
The only limit I know of is the space on the hard drive. How much is there?
On the site with the issue; https://support.mozilla.org/kb/Clear+Recent+History#w_how-do-i-remove-a-single-website-from-my-history
Remove History For One Site
Open the History Manager <Control><Shift> H. In the search bar, enter the name of the site. Right-click on one of the listings and select Forget About This Site. This should remove all information, including any passwords / settings.
Thanks Fred. The disk still has 30+GB on it, so I don't think that's it :)
And that trick only seems to work for a single subdomain, so it's not probably a good long-term fix. Any other thoughts? Thanks!
Remove History should remove everything for the selected site. Note: Including bookmarks, passwords . . . . .
Yeah, I've tried that (clearing everything from history) and it bought be a couple of weeks, but the problem comes back :(
I called for more help.
Awesome. Thanks Fred! I appreciate the help - hopefully we can get this resolved :)
There are some limits for the cookies (MaxCookiesPerHost defaults to 150).
See the source code.
// default limits for the cookie list. these can be tuned by the // network.cookie.maxNumber and network.cookie.maxPerHost prefs respectively. static const uint32_t kMaxNumberOfCookies = 3000; static const uint32_t kMaxCookiesPerHost = 150; static const uint32_t kMaxBytesPerCookie = 4096; static const uint32_t kMaxBytesPerPath = 1024;
You can override these limits by creating a new Integer pref on the about:config page as listed further down in the page code. These prefs do not exist by default.
// pref string constants static const char kPrefCookieBehavior[] = "network.cookie.cookieBehavior"; static const char kPrefMaxNumberOfCookies[] = "network.cookie.maxNumber"; static const char kPrefMaxCookiesPerHost[] = "network.cookie.maxPerHost"; static const char kPrefCookiePurgeAge[] = "network.cookie.purgeAge"; static const char kPrefThirdPartySession[] = "network.cookie.thirdparty.sessionOnly"; static const char kCookieLeaveSecurityAlone[] = "network.cookie.leave-secure-alone";
You can open the about:config page via the location/address bar. You can accept the warning and click "I'll be careful" to continue.