Profile-cleaner
Use profile-cleaner to reduce the size of browser profiles by organizing their sqlite databases using sqlite3's vacuum and reindex functions. The term "browser" is used loosely since profile-cleaner happily works on some email clients and newsreaders too.
Supported Browsers
- Brave (stable, beta, dev and nightly) (https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/brave-bin)
- Chromium (stable, beta, and dev)
- Conkeror
- Edge
- Falkon
- Firefox (stable, beta, and aurora)
- Google-chrome (stable, beta, and dev)
- Heftig's version of Aurora (https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=117157)
- Icecat
- Icedove
- Inox (https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=198763)
- Librewolf
- Midori
- Newsboat
- Palemoon
- Qupzilla
- Seamonkey
- Thunderbird
- Tor-browser
- Vivaldi (stable and snapshot)
Documentation
Consult the man page.
Installation from Source
To build from source, see the included INSTALL text document.
Installation from Distro Packages
Arch via the official package in [community]
Gentoo: See instructions below
NixOS: in the official repos
Slackware: on slackbuilds
Gentoo Users
Profile cleaner is in the main repo:
emerge -av app-admin/profile-cleaner
Other Distros
If you are interested in packaging profile-cleaner for your favorite distro, please contact me.
Dependencies
- bash
- bc
- findutils
- sqlite
- parallel
Sample Output and Results Using an "Uncleaned" Firefox Profile:
Size before: 154.17 Mbytes
Size after: 99.11 Mbytes
$ profile-cleaner f
/home/facade/.mozilla/firefox/zee52krz.default/cookies.sqlite reduced by .87 Mbytes
/home/facade/.mozilla/firefox/zee52krz.default/signons.sqlite reduced by .41 Mbytes
/home/facade/.mozilla/firefox/zee52krz.default/downloads.sqlite reduced by .56 Mbytes
/home/facade/.mozilla/firefox/zee52krz.default/chromeappsstore.sqlite reduced by .03 Mbytes
/home/facade/.mozilla/firefox/zee52krz.default/urlclassifier3.sqlite reduced by 43.10 Mbytes
/home/facade/.mozilla/firefox/zee52krz.default/formhistory.sqlite reduced by .11 Mbytes
/home/facade/.mozilla/firefox/zee52krz.default/addons.sqlite reduced by 0 Mbytes
/home/facade/.mozilla/firefox/zee52krz.default/permissions.sqlite reduced by 0 Mbytes
/home/facade/.mozilla/firefox/zee52krz.default/content-prefs.sqlite reduced by 0 Mbytes
/home/facade/.mozilla/firefox/zee52krz.default/extensions.sqlite reduced by 0 Mbytes
/home/facade/.mozilla/firefox/zee52krz.default/webappsstore.sqlite reduced by 0 Mbytes
/home/facade/.mozilla/firefox/zee52krz.default/OfflineCache/index.sqlite reduced by 0 Mbytes
/home/facade/.mozilla/firefox/zee52krz.default/search.sqlite reduced by 0 Mbytes
/home/facade/.mozilla/firefox/zee52krz.default/places.sqlite reduced by 9.98 Mbytes
firefox profile reduced by 55.06 Mbytes
Speed Comparison
28-Nov-2012 Profile-cleaner has been rewritten to use GNU Parallel for processing.
Here is a contrived example cleaning 6 firefox profiles comparing the classical version of Profile-cleaner which used for loops to process profiles to the new version:
- There are a total of 312 M in the 6 "dirty" profiles.
- Test machine is an Intel 3770K @ 4.50 GHz.
- After cleaning there is a total of 213 M in the 6 "clean" profiles.
new 4.07s user 0.42s system 318% cpu 1.411 total
old 8.15s user 0.43s system 95% cpu 8.942 total
Your mileage may vary.