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What exactly is in cookies.sqlite-wal?

  • 2 replies
  • 5 have this problem
  • 9 views
  • Last reply by ranfan

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My pc just crashed because of an issue with the ac adapter, and I can't exactly remember if firefox was closed or not. It wouldn't respond after opening it and didn't respond when opened in safe mode. I looked in the default profile folder and start to back everything up and noticed the cookies.sqlite-wal file was 16gb. I just moved it out of the folder and everything worked fine. Just thought it was odd.

My pc just crashed because of an issue with the ac adapter, and I can't exactly remember if firefox was closed or not. It wouldn't respond after opening it and didn't respond when opened in safe mode. I looked in the default profile folder and start to back everything up and noticed the cookies.sqlite-wal file was 16gb. I just moved it out of the folder and everything worked fine. Just thought it was odd.

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Here's my understanding/guess: Firefox includes a SQLite database component that interfaces with the cookies.sqlite database. The SQLite component creates WAL files during regular operation to optimize performance and then reconciles the WAL file with the actual database at idle times or at shutdown. If the WAL file became corrupted, perhaps that caused Firefox not to be able to access cookies??

http://www.sqlite.org/wal.html

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Thanks for your explanation. I never expected it to grow to such a large file size in a little over a week to be honest.