There are many people out there
complaining about the Firefox RAM Memory Bug. Lets get it straight.
It’s not a bug. It’s part of the cache feature. This ‘feature’ is how the
pages are cached in a tabbed environment.
To improve performance when
navigating (studies show that 39% of all page navigations are renavigations to
pages visited less than 10 pages ago, usually using the back button), Firefox
implements a Back-Forward cache that retains the rendered document for the last
five session history entries for each tab.
This is a lot of data. If you have a
lot of tabs, Firefox’s RAM memory usage can climb dramatically. It’s a
trade-off. What you get out of it is faster performance as you navigate the
web.
Now a lot of us have found the
’secrets’ on how to manipulate settings in “about:config” to drop the
memory usage as long as possible and to increase the speed at which
Firefox loads sites. Read on to find out how to do this.
Remember: Firefox (download it here) is the best internet browser
available (in my opinion), and these tweaks below will make it even greater and
faster. So enjoy!
Reduce the amount of RAM Firefox uses
for it’s cache feature
Here’s how to do it:
1. Type “about:config” (no quotes) in the adress bar in the browser.
2. Find “browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewer”
3. Set it’s value to “0“;(Zero)
Increase the Speed in Which Firefox
loads pages
1. Type “about:config” into the address
bar and hit Enter.
(Normally the browser will make one request to a web page at a time. When you
enable pipelining it will make several at once, which
really speeds up page loading.)
2. Alter the entries as follows:
Set “network.http.pipelining” to “true”
Set “network.http.proxy.pipelining” to “true”
Set “network.http.pipelining.maxrequests” to some number like 10.
This means it will make 10 requests
at once.
3. Lastly, right-click anywhere and select New->
Integer. Name it “nglayout.initialpaint.delay” and set its value to
“0“;.(Zero)
This value is the amount of time the
browser waits before it acts on information it receives. If you’re using a
broadband connection you’ll load pages faster now.
Optionally (for even faster web browsing) here are some more options for
your about:config (you might have to create some of these
entries by Right Click –> New– > Interger or String
network.dns.disableIPv6: set
“false”
“content.notify.backoffcount”: set “5“; (Five)
“plugin.expose_full_path”: set “true”.
“ui.submenuDelay”: set “0; (zero)
Reduce RAM usage to 10mb when Firefox
is minimized:
This little hack will drop
Firefox’s RAM usage down to 10 Mb when minimized:
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.
These simple tweaks will make your
web browsing with Mozilla Firefox 2-3 times faster and easier. And I
think they are fairly easy to apply. Enjoy!
[tags]firefox, tweaks, hack,
tweaking, tips, fix, ram memory, software, apps, free, open source,
mozilla[/tags]
