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.