Firefox4 freezes on startup after about 10 seconds. A second parallel instance of firefox works normally as long as the first instance is left alone frozen. What causes this and how can it be prevented?

Question

I am running firefox4 on win XP. When I start firefox, it says it is trying to restore a previous session which has only the blank tab. After about 10 seconds the whole instance of firefox freezes - none of the buttons work and the only way to close firefox is to use the Ctrl+Alt+Del and task manager. If I open a second parallel sessionof firefox, it works normally, as long as the first session is left alone (frozen). What could be causing the freeze up of the first firefox instance, and how can it be prevented?

Answer 1

I've done some research on the SQLite database. Whenever Aperture hangs up (like during auto-stack or opening the filter hud) there are thousands of SQLite queries happening. These SQLite queries cause massive file I/O because the database is stored on the disk as 1kb pages. However, the OS is caching the database file; mine's only 12MB. I'm trying to track down some performance numbers for SQLite on osx but having trouble.
It's starting to look like most of the speed problems are in the libraries that Aperture uses instead of the actual Aperture code. Of course, that doesn't completely let the developers off the hook since they choose to use them in the first place.
Oh, and if anyone is curious, the database is completely open to queries using the command line sqlite3 tool. Here's the language reference http://www.sqlite.org/lang.html
Hmm, just found this. Looks like someone else has been playing around in the db http://www.majid.info/mylos/stories/2005/12/01/apertureInternals.html
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