Filed under: Internet, Utilities, Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Mozilla, Browser Tips
Tweak the Firefox leak - Today's Browser Tip
by Victor Agreda, Jr. Apr 10th 2006
I tried this on my Mac and
PC and it seems to provide just a little relief. If you recall, Firefox tends to eat memory during browsing, especially
if you use a lot of tabs. For each tab, each page will cache several pages back and forward. This is nice if you want
speed, but bad if you have several tabs open at once, all active in different Windows. While some said this was a
memory leak, Mozilla came out to say it was, in fact, a feature. Well this made it to digg, and now the
people have had their say: this may fix your Firefox memory
leak. Then again, it might not. It's not a real fix, just a config change. What it does is flush the RAM of stored
pages, and move everything to the HD, where large chunks should stay. The author said this saves hundreds of MB at a
time. Once you minimize FF, the pages are moved to the HD from RAM. You can then restore FF and see the savings. As you
can see from the comments, the mileage you get out of this one varies. The good thing is, it's easily reversible and
isn't really hacking Firefox, just twiddling the controls a bit... For more enhancements, there's always the Firefox 1.5 tweak guide.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
shadekh said 5:34AM on 4-11-2006
a common confusion that is prevalent with the firefox memory leak is the "its not a leak, its a feature" routine. As it so happens, many people have got two completely different issues confused.
Firefox 1.5's fast back/fast forward feature catches the last visted pages, which is what causes the "its a feature" leak, and can be tweaked by the browsercache element in about:config
Hopwever, the tab memory leak is completely different. What happens is that firefox refuses to release memory from closed tabs (and not because of the catching feature, this big has existed since 1.0 and possibly earlier).What it supposedly does is reuse the memory and does not release it to the OS. However, that dosent work quite well, ot seems, as there is always an upward progression and never a downward one. Which means that firefox is still demanding more memory instead of reusing the old memory fully.
That in effect means heavy tab users like me very quickly use up availiable memory, specially when combined with firefox's uncompressed images bug.
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