Posted on 01/24/2005 3:04:40 PM PST by Terpfen
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 16MB. If you want 16MB, enter this value into the dialog prompt:
16384
(Why 16384 instead of 16000? Because computers use base-12 counting. Thus 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.
Hope I did a service to some FReepers today.
Most helpful. Thanks.
Thanks!
>>>>Because computers use base-12 counting.
No, computers use binary.
Yeah, but memory allocation is still done in base-12, and that's what this thread's about.
What exactly do you mean?
What do you mean by what do I mean? *confused*
2^8 2^7 2^6 2^5 2^4 2^3 2^2 2^1 256 128 64 32 16 8 4 2
thus - 1MB = 1024 bytes = 2^10 and so on...
Odd, I was always under the impression that allocation uses base-12.
Ah well, thanks for the correction.
Sorry Terpfen, he is right. It's all based on binary. That is why on and off are represented on power keys with zero and one ( 0/1 ).
You might be thinking of hexadecimal... which is base 16.
I'll try it, see if it makes what's good better!
There are 10 kinds of people in the world - those who understand binary and those who don't.
There indeed are. (I know enough to get THAT joke.)
Doesn't hurt to give it a try, but I think all this is going to do is force Firefox to swap pages out to the page file. You may notice an increase in hard drive activity.
Firefox bump for later reference
Is there a problem with Firefox using 70 megs when you have 256? I haven't noticed any performance issues.
I've been using it for a while and don't hear or notice any additonal activity. YMMV, of course.
Generally, it's bad whenever a program chews up more memory than it needs. 70 out of 256 is pretty damn disproportionate, IMO.
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