Solved Preference file gets extremely huge

[colebantam]

Hello all,

On several customer PCs the preference file gets really huge, and Vivaldi becomes extremely slow/unstable as a result.

It seems like the position in the file where it gets bloated is always the same. here is the line (extremely shortened) from a preference file that has 1.4GB in size:

~~ "manifest":{"app":{"launch":{"web_url":"https://chrome.google.com/webstore"},"urls":["https://chrome.google.com/webstore"]},"description":"Entdecken Sie tolle Apps, Spiele, Erweiterungen und Designs fÃÆâ€Ãƒâ€ Ã¢â‚¬â„¢ÃƒÆ’†â€™ÃÆâ€ÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã‚ ÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â₠--- extremely shortened --- ¬Â¦Ãƒâ€šÃ‚¡ÃƒÆâ€Ãƒâ€ Ã¢â‚¬â„¢ÃƒÆ’¢â‚¬Å¡ÃÆâ€ÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã…¡Ãƒâ€šÃ‚¤ring | effizient bauen"}], ~~

On an other PC, with 60KB preference file, that line is also a bit bloated, but not as extreme by far:

~~ "manifest":{"app":{"launch":{"web_url":"https://chrome.google.com/webstore"},"urls":["https://chrome.google.com/webstore"]},"description":"Entdecken Sie tolle Apps, Spiele, Erweiterungen und Designs fÃÆâ€Ãƒâ€ Ã¢â‚¬â„¢ÃƒÆ’†â€™ÃÆâ€ÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã‚ ÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢ÃƒÆâ€Ãƒâ€ Ã¢â‚¬â„¢ÃƒÆ’¢â‚¬Å¡ÃÆâ€ÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã…¡Ãƒâ€šÃ‚¼r Vivaldi."
~~ (not shortened)

I'm not sure with what version that problem began, but I get reports since 5.0 Update 4.

Does anybody know what causes this and how to resolve that, other than by resetting the preference file?

Claus

[colebantam]

@komposten

Thanks for your answer. I will not report a bug, because I think this issue came from a badly written logon-skript that alters the preference-file. I improved the script and added a function to replace files that are too big.

Its just strange that the problems started with the 5.0 Update 4 rollout, because that script was already in use for a longer time. Maybe Vivaldi became moire sensitive to huge preference-files with Update 4. Whatever, not a Vivaldi bug as it seems ...

But can you tell me, what editor you used, that gives you this nicely formatted view on the pref-file?

[Komposten]

Looks like a text encoding issue. The same segment on my machine looks like this:

"app": {
            "launch": {
              "web_url": "https://chrome.google.com/webstore"
            },
            "urls": ["https://chrome.google.com/webstore"]
          },
          "description": "Discover great apps, games, extensions and themes for Vivaldi.",
          "icons": {
            "128": "webstore_icon_128.png",
            "16": "webstore_icon_16.png"
          },

So I would guess that the ü in für isn't encoded properly when it's written to (or read from) the file, which leads to garbage characters. The next time Vivaldi reads/writes the file it tries to encode those garbage characters and fails, adding even more garbage. And so it continues, and so the file grows.

---

Definitely a bug, and a pretty bad one. I suggest that you report it (https://vivaldi.com/bugreport/), and include a link to this thread in the report.

[colebantam]

@komposten

Thanks for your answer. I will not report a bug, because I think this issue came from a badly written logon-skript that alters the preference-file. I improved the script and added a function to replace files that are too big.

Its just strange that the problems started with the 5.0 Update 4 rollout, because that script was already in use for a longer time. Maybe Vivaldi became moire sensitive to huge preference-files with Update 4. Whatever, not a Vivaldi bug as it seems ...

But can you tell me, what editor you used, that gives you this nicely formatted view on the pref-file?

[iAN CooG]

@colebantam I personally use Notepad++ with JSON viewer plugin

[Pathduck]

@colebantam There's also:

https://tomeko.net/software/JSONedit/
https://www.mitec.cz/jsonv.html

Or if you're the crazy sort
jq . Secure\ Preferences
https://stedolan.github.io/jq/

[Komposten]

@colebantam said in Preference file gets extremely huge:

Thanks for your answer. I will not report a bug, because I think this issue came from a badly written logon-skript that alters the preference-file. I improved the script and added a function to replace files that are too big.

Ah, okay. Makes sense.

But can you tell me, what editor you used, that gives you this nicely formatted view on the pref-file?

I use Atom with the atom-beautify plugin. It supports dozens of different text formats and programming languages.

[colebantam]

Thanks for all the editor-suggestions. I will have a look at them