Firefox 1.5 (Memory) Issues - Easy Resolution

Miscellaneous Ramblings....

Tuesday, January 3. 2006

Firefox 1.5 (Memory) Issues - Easy Resolution

Fortunately, there seems to be a pretty easy fix for the Firefox 1.5 memory leak issues that have been springing up all over the Internet; it simply involves setting up another Firefox variable to control the memory consumption as noted by this website.

1. Pull up the about:config page in Firefox
2. Create a new setting ([New]->[Integer]) called: browser.cache.memory.capacity
3. Enter the amount in kb (try 22528; this assumes 512 MB of RAM)
4. Close and restart Firefox for the change to take effect

An additional setting to put in place is the config.trim_on_minimize parameter (Windows only), which trims the working set upon browser minimization (here is a complete list of the about:config settings with their meanings):

1. Pull up the about:config page in Firefox
2. Create a new setting ([New]->[Boolean]) called: config.trim_on_minimize
3. Select the value True
4. Close and restart Firefox for the change to take effect

With the above tweaks in place, I was able to run my Firefox for awhile without it chewing like a wildfire through my memory.
(For more specific settings based on total amount of RAM in the system check out this MozillaZine Page. Also, here is the Firefox about:protocol links reference page)
Also, you can check on the current cache settings (memory and disk) pulling up the about:cache page in Firefox.

Ironically, it seem like this is an issue that is not new in Firefox 1.5, but has been hanging around for awhile (since I blogged about this back in September of 2005), but some users have noted that it seems to be considerably worse in Firefox 1.5.
Posted by Colleen Velo in Computers, Firefox Comments: (0) Trackbacks: (3)

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