06 Feb 2010

Fix the firefox memory hog

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If you’ve been using firefox long enough you’ll agree, that the awesome browser can be a huge memory hog, specially on OS X. I switched to safari only for this reason, after 5 tabs I would begin to notice massive lags, ofcouse your mileage may wary but that has been my experience. So I tried to figure out why would mozilla do this to us, and if such a huge memory leak existed , why did they never fix it.

I found that the supposed memory leak is supposed to be a performance feature and each tab was assigned ridiculous amounts of memory to cache pages. I am using firefox 3.6, I don’t know if these options exist in older versions as well but they do exist in firefox 3.6

To fix this, type in “about:config” in the address bar

You can safely click next your computer will now burn out.

After clicking next type in “browser.cache” in the filter field.

browser cache screen

Look for the value that says “browser.cache.memory.capacity”

It would say something ridiculously huge number , I’ve set it to 16384 , which roughly means 16 megs, and firefox is behaving itself ever since.

That’s it. Restart and enjoy.


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  • JPL
    Pages are now loading faster and im not getting 120 something megs memory use for just 2 tabs anymore. Thanks for the article!
  • Sh33p
    If you can't find the setting, create it as an integer. You can find a guide here
    http://cybernetnews.com/this-may-help-your-firefox-memory-leak/
    Then just copy the browser.cache.memory.enable schtick and assign it a value of 16384. That's what I'm trying.
  • JTK
    I'm in the same boat you are. Firefox slows everything down to a crawl, Safari is featureless and unreliable (can't even select text to c&p consistently properly), and Chrome crashes all the time.

    Your fix sounds logical and great, but I have Firefox 3.6 on OS X and while I can find "browser.cache.memory.enable" - there is no "browser.cache.memory.capacity".

    The only thing with that word is "browser.cache.disk.capacity" and "browser.cache.offline.capacity".

    Ideas? Thanks!
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