FireFox Memory Hacks to help You

Hack #1

Now, this is by no means a REAL fix for the Firefox memory leak, but it certainly does appear to help it quite a bit. This little fix will move Firefox to your hard drive when you minimize it, and as a result it will take up less than 10MB of memory while minimized. So far, from my experiences with using this today, when you maximize Firefox it will obviously increase the memory usage. However, it does not seem to go back up to the insane amount that it was at before minimizing it. For example, Firefox was at 180MB of memory usage and then I minimized it and after a few seconds I maximized it. After maximizing it and continuing on my routine business it appeared to only have gone up to 60MB. This seems to be a good solution for me right now since I frequently maximize and minimize Firefox anyways.

Now I know many people will say that Firefox will take longer to maximize since it will be located on the hard drive, but I haven’t noticed ANY delays. It is able to redraw itself just as quickly as if it was located in the ram (in my experience). Okay, now here are the few simple steps:

1. Open Firefox and go to the Address Bar. Type in about:config and then press Enter.
2. Right Click in the page and select New -> Boolean.
3. In the box that pops up enter config.trim_on_minimize. Press Enter.
4. Now select True and then press Enter.
5. Restart Firefox.

See how quick and painless that was? At any rate you can always go back and delete the same setting that you just created if you start to experience any issues. I have also set the browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers value to 0 because that will prevent Firefox from caching pages for the back button. This is also supposed to free up some memory that gets stolen.

Hack #2

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 60MB. If you want 60MB, enter this value into the dialog prompt:

6000

(Remember the number should be base 12 because computers use base-12 counting. Thus for example 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.

Hack #3

Also remember, the following Applications also eat up memory.

1. Flash
2. Acrobat Reader
3. Clean up your Download Manager
4. Do not install all the extensions you can find

Now as for flash, I would recommend Internet Explorer if you have low memory. As for Acrobat reader, I would recommend downloading the file to your computer, and then reading it [Do not open it through FireFox]

Hack #4

There has been a lot of talk about how to optimize Firefox to run the most efficiently. CNet’s most recent article goes through some helpful tips but doesn’t jump into many details. Here I am going to explain which extensions have memory leaks or will slow down Firefox’s performance.

First, before I dive into the main topic there are a few things that you should change in your Firefox settings if you really want to optimize this. Just follow this tutorial that I put together.

Okay, now let’s talk about the extensions. This is the point that you may want to turn your head because I am about to bring some truth to some of the most popular extensions.

1. IE Tab 1.0.7! Yes, it is true that one of the most convenient extensions has a memory leak. I can’t say that I am super shocked by this because how efficient can it be to run Internet Explorer in Firefox?
2. Session Saver 0.2.1.031 has a known memory leak.
3. ForecastFox 0.8.5 also has a memory leak…and that very disappointing since most Firefox users have this sitting in their toolbar (so what is the weather like by you :) ).
4. Filterset.G Updater AND FlashGot used in conjunction will produce a memory leak.
5. FasterFox doesn’t have a memory leak specifically, but it will not help your Firefox performance. It does help your browsing performance but if you decide to keep this extension at least make sure you don’t have prefetching enabled.
6. Tabbrowser Extensions doesn’t have memory leaks either but will definitely slow Firefox down and it has many conflicts with other extension. It can even stop Firefox from being able to startup! A better alternative is Tab Mix or Tab Mix Plus which offer the same set of features. If you don’t need all the features of Tab Mix Plus then just use Tab Mix to lower the memory usage a little.
7. Please check for updates to ensure you are using the most recent version of the following extensions: Adblock 0.5.3.042, AdBlock Plus 0.6.1.1, NoScript 1.1.3.9, Search Keys 0.7.3, Thumbs 0.6.2 — each of these extensions HAD known memory leaks but they have now been fixed.

That is about it for the most popular Firefox extensions that have been tested. Another important thing to do is upgrade to Firefox 1.5.0.1 if you haven’t already. This build has fixed two memory leaks that were very common: leak when selecting and leak from global scope polluter. The latest trunk also has a long list of memory leak fixes so keep your eyes peeled for a new release of Firefox.

Read More Here

[via: Cybernet and FreeRepublic]