This Mozillazine article,
Reducing Memory Usage (Firefox), is giving me some ideas. As many here will know, memory consumption has been my biggest complaint about Mozilla and its progeny. First on Windows, then on the Mac -- which means I can't blame
everything on the OS's memory management.
People who shut the browser down every day probably don't run into these problems, but I can have a dozen web pages open for days at a time. It all starts adding up after a while.
One of the first things I looked at was
browser.cache.memory.capacity. It's supposed to cache about 22MB of data in memory on a 512MB system. But when I typed
about:cache?device=memory into the address bar, I got this:
Quote:
Number of entries: 1503
Maximum storage size: 22528 KiB
Storage in use: 140472 KiB
Inactive storage: 0 KiB
|
If the max storage is 22MB, then why is it using
140MB at the moment?
As I understand it, the memory cache is supposed to
supplement the disk cache (76,800KB max, 76,769KB in use), not cache images from a site I visited a week ago. Why is it keeping 2MB jpegs in memory and 2K gifs on disk?
Good grief. No wonder Firefox is using 257MB of RAM (and another 1.4GB of virtual memory) right now.
So first I'm going to turn the memory cache off altogether (
browser.cache.memory.enable) and see if that makes a difference. Reclaiming 140MB would be a nice start. There may be a cost in performance -- but performance ain't so great as it is.
I'll update this thread as I learn what works and what doesn't, in case it proves useful to someone. Maybe I'm not the only one who shuts the browser down once a month.
Randall
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