Firefox Memory Leakage Be Damned
Nov 26th, 2007 by Alex
I’ve gotten into the habit of leaving Firefox open for weeks at a time. I like having my tabs available without having to wait. Usually I’ve got Google Reader and Gmail loaded, as well as a few other status screens. I’ve also taken to bitching about the performance problems with the computer. For some reason I was forgetting that Firefox leaks memory like a sieve and needs to be restarted periodically. The browser alone (with 4-5 tabs open) was consuming a full third of available system memory.
For a while I was talking about buying an iBook and being done with it, but I reconsidered that over the weekend. Rather than rationalizing buying a new computer or more memory, my cheap solution is to bookmark a set of tabs and have the set load when starting Firefox. The goal being to close (and kill) Firefox at least once a day. Done.
I’m kicking myself in the ass for not doing it earlier. I’m irked that the engineer in me didn’t put two and two together, not realizing that my behavior was more or less the reason for the performance issues.
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Have you considered trying the new Firefox 3 beta? Everything I’ve read says that the memory management is superior.
I have two other suggestions to help you:
1) Disable the disk caching in Firefox: Tools –> Option –> Network Tab –> set the size 0. Anybody on a decent network connection doesn’t need to bother with caching to the disk. The disk is the slowest part in a computer (especially a laptop), so save the I/O.
2) Adjust the browser.cache.memory.capacity configuration option to be a lower number as well.
DJ: Oh snap, there we go! Reduced my disk cache to 0. The second option wasn’t present in about:config at all. We’ll see what happens.
Sounds worth a try. Firefox seems much buggier than it used to be.