FF and ram usage

**juliensimon** · 11-03-2009, 01:55 PM

Hi all,

I am not sure if you have noticed but my computer kept on crashing and I didn't know why. I had a couple of software running and they would crash about twice a day.

I then looked at the processes ni the task manager. FF was taking 1GB of ram.
I switched to Chrome, it's taking about 100MB.
I believe all the plugins for firefox made it huge to run.

anyway, just sharing that here. If you are using FF, you might want to check it out as well.

Natural Elements · 11-03-2009, 02:49 PM

How many plugins for firefox do you have Julien?

I've got 3 plugins with FF3. I use FF occasionally because I have more functionality with IE8 and I am about giving up working on Mozilla.

**Cricket** · 11-03-2009, 02:53 PM

I only use FF these days when I am reviewing a website or working on some specific web stuff. It just became a horrible resource hog. Chrome is my default.

Floobynooby · 11-03-2009, 03:19 PM

It may be worth running mem test to check and see if there is a problem with your ram. If there is it can be that once a certain amount of ram gets used then the system becomes unstable, crashes or freezes. Have had a few problems with this in the past and it can wipe your hard disk if it goes wrong.

**3ncryptabl3_lick** · 11-03-2009, 04:01 PM

Yeah, using the term, 'my computer kept on crashing' is pretty ambiguous. Do you mean BSOD? Restarting? APP hangs/lockups? Just because a program takes up a gb of ram doesn't necessarily mean it's going to crash your computer. (unless of course you don't have a gb of ram to spare)

Though if the same program has stability issues, I would take a second look at the plugins installed, and not necessarily the fact that it takes up a gb of ram. I mean, how many plugins do you need to have running at once? Seriously.

SonnyCooL · 11-04-2009, 12:14 AM

try fresh FF reinstall .... it might help

JennyRipley · 11-04-2009, 04:02 AM

I use FF with few plugins so it works well.

mhuktar · 11-04-2009, 05:17 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by juliensimon

Hi all,

I am not sure if you have noticed but my computer kept on crashing and I didn't know why. I had a couple of software running and they would crash about twice a day.

I then looked at the processes ni the task manager. FF was taking 1GB of ram.
I switched to Chrome, it's taking about 100MB.
I believe all the plugins for firefox made it huge to run.

anyway, just sharing that here. If you are using FF, you might want to check it out as well.

I suggest to clear your private data,

I previously have show many tips to reduce the memory usage of Firefox. Even show a application that forces Firefox to use virtual memory and cpu to reduce physical memory usage. Most of them reduced the memory usage to a great extent, still i would love Firefox memory usage to around 90 to 120 MB. Below are few tweaks in the about:config that does some tough things.

1. Reduce memory usage when minimize

Do you know Firefox keeps sucking memory each time you minimize your Firefox. This tip will reduce the memory usage when each time you minimize your Firefox.

1. Start up Firefox
2. Type in about:config in the address bar and hit Enter
3. Right click and choose New > Boolean
4. Type config.trim_on_minimize in the pop-up box and hit Enter
5. Select True and hit Enter.
6. Restart your Firefox

2. Fixed the cache capacity

Firefox caches each page so that when you go back to a website so it doesnt need to load the page elements again to redisplayed. By default, this setting was set to -1 which mean, Firefox use the cache memory depends on your RAM size. Reducing the value will minimize the memory usage.

1. Start up Firefox
2. Type about:config in the address bar and hit Enter
3. In the filter, enter this string browser.cache.memory.capacity
4. If you set to 0, Firefox will not cache any pages.
3. browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers
4. By default, it was set to -1 which mean, Firefox will automatically decide maximum pages to be stored in memory. Change the value to 0 will stop Firefox from store any pages in memory. If you want to use other value, read here for more info.

4. Less extension the merrier

Thou extensions are really helpful they are the prime reason Firefox to use more RAM. Few badly coded extensions can cause memory leak. Either uninstall or upgrade your extensions to the latest version may fix the problems.

I hope that the following tweaks reduce the memory usage to some extent,. I think you should start beta testing Firefox 3, it’s turning out to be the best Firefox browser up till now.

find More Info: hxxp : // www . thinktechno . com/2008/03/04/4-memory-reduction-tweaks-for-firefox/.