Reduce Firefox Memory Consumption

Posted by Martin in Browsing, firefox  Tags: , , , , , ,

25

Feb



Firefox seems to need more memory when I have it open for a long time and surf to many different websites. I was never able to find out why it behaved this way and assumed that it was either a memory leak or an extension which would be responsible for this behavior.

It seems that my assumption was wrong. Firefox saves the last 50 visited websites of a single session in memory which means that it could add up quickly if you visit lots of content filled websites. The reason behind this is that it is faster to access a already visited website if it still resides in memory instead of loading it from disk cache or from the server.

50 sites on the other hand seems a lot to me. I usually do not visit sites again that I visited a while ago - I tend to visit many different sites and only a few ones more than once daily. The fix is relatively simple. Type about:config in the Firefox address bar and search for the term:

browser.sessionhistory.max_entries

Right-click the entry, select modify from the list and change it to a lower value. I set it to 5 which works well for my surfing habits. Other values might be better for yours.

source: A2Z


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13 Users Commented In This Post

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al saiz says:

Now this was a great tip. Thanks.

Thinker says:

I will try it, Firefox eats memory much more than IE :/
Sometimes after long using firefox, even if I got 1 page opened, FF takes up to 1GB of ram :[

jackal9 says:

Memory leak is the only chink in the armor in Firefox for me, so ill check this out and c… thanx

tash says:

Another really good thing to do is in the about:config screen right click and go to new boolean, then type config.trim_on_minimize and set it to true,
Now whenever you minimize firefox, it’ll reduce the amount of ram it takes a lot. Usually down to

Thinker says:

tash thanks for your tip, it makes a big diffrence now :)

Steve J says:

Great tips thankyou Martin and tash I’ll give both a try

Speed up Firefox by Improving Memory Usage says:

[...] first read this trick on Ghack and then I tried it myself. It made my Firefox work smoothly for [...]

Superfluence - The Admin Files » Blog Archiv » Diät für Firefox says:

[...] gefunden auf: Mikas Blog und Hacks.net [...]

Anonymous says:

Thanks a lot for this tip eh!

Great Success!

Dudley’s Weblog says:

[...] 50. Ich bin noch am ausprobieren, welcher Wert da für meine Surfgewohnheiten passend ist. Meine Quelle hat sich für 5 entschieden, mal sehen wie sich das [...]

Adam Crowe - links for 2007-10-28 says:

[...] ghacks - Reduce Firefox Memory Consumption “Type about:config in the Firefox address bar and search for the term: ‘browser.sessionhistory.max_entries’ Set lower to 5 (or whatever works for you)” (tags: firefox hacks memory browser) [...]

Sam’s World Of No » I eat Wheetos for breakfast. Firefox prefers to gorge on RAM, all day. says:

[...] for some reason, Firefox is using up memory. Over the next few days I will be attempting various suggested remedies (including disabling the Google Firefox Toolbar, ironically enough) and I’ll try to [...]

JackBoy says:

Firefox eats up memory like there is no tomorrow .. I have been a firefox fun for a long time .. Being a tech guru I inspired all my friends who ran to me that IE not responding problem . But now I just cant go with Firefox anymore It shuts down like 20 times a day . And acrobat stops responding like 100 times a day .. I am just looking for another browser to tab me going … probably not IE may be Opera or Flock may do the trick for me

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