Fixing Firefox's memory leak (January, 2005)

[Terpfen]

I noticed a few Firefox threads here have people complaining about how much memory Firefox takes up. This is a known memory leak, and the Mozilla guys haven't gotten around to fixing it for whatever reason. But there's no reason your Firefox should take up 70,000K in memory, so here's how to fix that memory leak and keep Firefox from bloating up.

1. Open a new tab. Type "about:config" without quotes into the address bar and hit enter/click Go.

2. Right-click anywhere, select New, then Integer. In the dialog prompt that appears, type:

browser.cache.memory.capacity

3. Click OK. Another dialog prompt will appear. This is where you decide how much memory to allocate to Firefox. This depends on how much RAM your computer has, but generally you don't want to allocate too little (under 8MB), but if you allocate too much, you might as well not do this. A good recommended setting is 16MB. If you want 16MB, enter this value into the dialog prompt:

16384

(Why 16384 instead of 16000? Because computers use base-12 counting. Thus 16 megabytes = 16384 bytes. Likewise, if you want to double that and allocate 32MB, you'd enter 32768.)

4. Click OK to close the dialog box, then close all instances of Firefox and restart. If your Firefox still uses the same amount of memory, give it a few minutes and it should slowly clear up. If that fails, try a system reboot.

Hope I did a service to some FReepers today.

[wpbdude1]

I should have my brains checked, but I have 69 extensions active and 44 just sitting there not being used. Sometimes I will activate or deactivate an extension when I want it's functionality. Right now I have 6 tabs open and FFv1.5.0.6 is hoggin appx 237MB but using only 2-17 CPU clicks.... Yes, I find it unstable, but I still like it better than IE....I think it's because I am a tweak-nut. Oh well.

[bwteim]

2005: "Hope I did a service to some FReepers today."

2006: and even a year later you helped some none FReepers. See

"I know on the current Firefox, you can take measures [freerepublic.com / http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/1327586/posts] to restrict its size but I think it starts to thrash when I go to a largely intensive Flash site. "

From
Firefox 2.0 RC3 Released
http://slashdot.org/articles/06/10/17/1215241.shtml

[Terpfen]

Yeah, this article ranks pretty high on search engine results lists. I'm amazed. Thanks for the notice!

[bwteim]

You're welcome. That about:config is handy to keep as reference and use. I am using 2.0 now, BTW. Had to remove some extensions at first.

[Terpfen]

You're welcome.

And tell those same people that Firefox 3 is slated to fix a whole host of memory leaks, partially due to its codebase getting a fairly extensive reworking.

[RapierWit]

I installed a free Freememory program. It seems to have helped. Also if click the "-" hide the page/browser button at the top right it refreshes FireFox.

[itwonder]

The Firefox memory issues may have little to do with Firefox itself, at least in some cases. I found the culprit was actually the popular Zone Alarm firewall on my PC. There is some sort of coexistence problem with Zone Alarm and p2p or tunneling applications that cause its memory usage to continually grow. For some reason, this growing memory usage also happens to Firefox. The solution for me was to remove Zone Alarm and repalce it with the free Comodo Firewall Pro. My memory issues with Firefox and the firewall are gone.

[Terpfen]

That’s a separate issue with Zone Alarm, which really isn’t as good as advertised. Sygate and Comodo are better software firewall options. (But it’s really in your best interest to get a hardware firewall.)

Firefox’s memory leaks are well-known, so it’s not a matter of Zone Alarm somehow interfering with Firefox. Luckily, the upcoming Firefox 3.0 fixes a good lot of them.

[narses]

Another fix - boolean - config.trim_on_minimize - true

[MarkL]

Base 12?

Mark

[MarkL]

Keith is absolutely right. Everything a computer does in processing IS binary. However people don't deal with binary math very well. It's messy and easy to make mistakes. So the binary values are REPRESENTED by different bases: Historically, 8 bit computers used "octal," or base 8, since this was able to represent the values that a "byte" can hold, from 0 - 255, 256 unique values. In octal, that would be represented by the octal values 0 - 377. However modern computer programmers and other geeks prefer to use base 16, or Hexadecimal. 2 Hex characters can represent the same values of 0 - 255 that it takes Octal 3 characters to represent. In hexadecimal the digits are 0-9 and a-f, with 'a' representing the value (decimal) 10. The character 'f' represents the (decimal) value of 15. So "f0" represents 240, and "ff" represents 255 (decimal).

So, in other words, these different bases are just used by us dumb humans, because it's SO MUCH EASIER to represent 00011110 as 1e, or 30 decimal.

Mark

[Terpfen]

Yeah, I’ve heard it already.

Sheesh, you goof up a minor detail in an article meant to help people out and you never hear the end of it, even two years later.

[narses]

See mine at 50. Any issues that I ought to be aware of?

[rogerdpack]

another fix -set to 0 - browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers

[Lee'sGhost]

No good deed goes unpunished.