My slow connection

[cicus]

In another topic I described that my login process took 2 minutes. Fred advised to delete a file named 'db' from my BBO directory. He assured me this would not cause any adverse effects. This worked like wonders, login takes about 15 seconds now from pressing enter until the news window appears and all tables are loaded.

 

So far, so good. But a question remains: if this file can be deleted without pain and its only impact on my system is that login times increase unbearably, then what is it for? I inspected the contents of this file: it includes user profiles, information on clubs etc. And its size is growing all the time. When I deleted it it was almost 18 MB big, now it is around 1.5 MB.

 

Gábor

[barmar]

It sounds like this is a cache of information that you've viewed, to speed things up when you go back to a screen you'd viewed before. So if you view someone's profile, and then view it again later, it doesn't have to be downloaded over the network; this is important for an interface like BBO, which constantly displays profiles as the mouse passes over users.

 

But over time it gets cluttered up with lots of obsolete information that's no longer useful, and the file just keeps growing. The reason it slows things down is probably because the program has to rewrite such a huge file as it's downloading new information; deleting it means that it only has to rewrite a 1.5MB file instead of an 18MB file -- the file is about 1/10 the size, and notice that your logins are about 10 times faster.