Tuesday, February 14, 2006

How to stop Firefox from "leaking" memory

To all my loyal viewers: Today I am going to reveal a deep, dark, secret about Firefox. How to disable the memory leak that can cause it to take ove >1GB RAM.

  1. Open up a new tab and navigate to "about:config" or use the extention Preferential (http://tinyurl.com/bpn2q)
  2. Find "browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers"
  3. set the Value to Zero (0)
What this is doing is stopping firefox from cacheing pages you've seen. The reason this can sometimes be a problem is when you visit multimedia-heavy or AJAXy pages (like digg or Google Reader) Firefox tries to remember all of that stuff in addition to what you have now. A more detailed explenation of this is available at http://tinyurl.com/d3rsg.

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