Wednesday, August 02, 2006

Reducing Firefox Memory Consumption

Firefox uses incredible amounts of memory. Some of this is caused by various undiagnosed memory leaks. Looking around on the net, I found a few things that can help, short of restarting all the time:

  1. Make sure you have the latest version (currently 1.5.0.5)

  2. Enter about:config in the address bar.

  3. Right click, add Boolean: config.trim_on_minimize (true)

  4. Right click, add Integer: browser.cache.memory.capacity (32768)

  5. Restart Firefox.

  6. If things get sluggish, minimize the window and restore it.



Using a tool like CachemanXP can quickly show how well the "trim_on_minimize" setting is working.