[tinyhitman]

Anecdotally in a certain Chrome version somewhere in the past years I've noticed something like this. The first 2 characters in my omnibox caused a terrible slowdown. So likely the history used for autocomplete kept growing or there was no sane index on the data.

Clearing my history fixed it to be _instantly_ again (even with history of a few days) and it took a few weeks to be very slow again.

So yes, I'd say its very likely that some of our assumptions might be false around such matters :)

luckily this was fixed sometime, but unfortunately this seems to coincide with autocomplete of Chrome not showing literally anything anymore.

[londons_explore]

All browsers seem to slow down with an old profile.

I suspect it's because all the unit and regression tests are run with fresh profiles, and nobody tests performance with a crufty 10 year old profile thats been through a lot of file format migrations, with highly fragmented indexes etc.

[tinyhitman]

Yeah this is likely. Not sure about other browsers but I haven't noticed any of such issues myself anymore. And hey, if it ain't broke... It would be a nice for browsermakers to implement such a testsuite tho, but until then its just too easy to just clear data. Average user has all data synced to their respective cloud accounts anyway or don't care enough.

[Lex-2008]

I believe that modern web browsers limit your history to 3 months, so it's almost like you never have a profile older than 3 months :)

[wizzwizz4]

I got quite upset when three years of browser history were wiped out by an update. A Firefox update, of all things! I still can't find the setting to restore the old behaviour.

[throwaway33ku9]

I've never experienced this.

I just checked (in Firefox) my history panel, sorted by date... Today, Yesterday, Last 7 days, This Month, a named month for the prior 5, and Older than 6 months.

And some of the randomly sampled stuff in that giant last category is quite old.

[brucedawson]

If the slowdown is sufficiently bad and it's happening on Windows then you can always record an ETW trace (https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/9025467) and share it with me. My DMs are open: https://twitter.com/brucedawson0xb I've resolved a few Chrome performance issues due to strangers on the internet sharing ETW traces with me, and analyzing those traces is actually my day job.

[tinyhitman]

Sorry for the late response. This was on Windows yes but it must've been fixed by now as I very rarely reset profiles and haven't experienced this since. I'll keep your offer in the back of my head tho, thanks!