Firefox Memory Problem Solved? Or, Rather, Workaround For Firefox 4, Others!

So I was telling you about the problems I had with ever increasing memory consumption in my Firefox 4.

I thought Memory Fox was going to solve the problem and I installed it. However, the problem is still there. With Memory Fox, the memory gets apparently reduced, however the responsiveness of the system is still not great after a while.



So I kept on searching, and found a better solution, here at Browser.sessionhistory.max total viewers.

It turns out that Firefox will by default automatically adjust the number of history pages PER TAB. The adjustment is such that for most of the modern computers, you will store 8 history pages PER TAB. This is clearly not appropriate for people like me who like to have upwards of 20 tabs up in Firefox.

The solution/workaround is:

Type about:config in your Firefox address bar.

Scroll down until you find the variable Browser.sessionhistory.max total viewers. You will probably find the value of (-1), which is automatic adjustment to up to 8.

Right click on the value and modify to 0 or 1.
This will be the number of history pages per firefox tab that you will store. I have used 1 for a couple of days now and Firefox worked much better than with Memory Fox, yet, the memory consumption is still outrageous after a couple days.

You can play around with this number, and let me know your situation, and how the fix worked for you.


Just leave a comment below.






5 comments:

John said...

Hey this is great. Thanks very much. FF 4 is a memory pig and the problem seems to get worse with each rev - at least with the OSX version.

Disclosure said...

Thanks John. I'll be testing this now with Firefox 7.0.1. Firefox 7 is still a memory hog if you ask me.

Disclosure said...

I'm running Firefox 7.0.1 with Browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers set to 0 and I do not see any adverse effects on speed or snappiness.

To the contrary!

The memory consumption seems much less. After a long while I am running Firefox in a "fast mode"! I mean it feels a lot faster and I can actually get significantly more work done!

Anonymous said...

It`s not suggestion you posted. Real trouble in JS and memory leaks in it. Understand?

Disclosure said...

Anonymous, sorry my solution didn't work for you. But, did you even try it like I did?

Your way of thinking will only stop you from helping yourself.

Instead you will dwell on solutions you can do nothing about.

Your choice.

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