This May Help Your Firefox Memory Leak

[sdb815]

I've been using this tweak for a couple of weeks now and haven't noticed any slow downs in my browsing speeds. (Y)

[XerXis]

Well this works like a treat, thanks topic starter for this :D

I'm on a slow spec pc as it is and this helps me.

I went from 37mb to 4mb :whistle: works!! :woot:

how does it help you while surfing? can't make any difference

[+Warwagon MVC]

how does it help you while surfing? can't make any difference

the way I understood it is now he can free up a bunch of ram so everything else runs better

[IceDogg]

I tested this for a while too, and noticed no slow downs at all. I wanted to try it for a while before recommending it (previously in this forum). Doesn't seem to hurt performance at all here.

[hotdog666al]

I'm getting like 120-400MB RAM used up on Firefox!

Wtf is up with that!!

AHAAAA, this makes it go down to 5-6MB!!

[+Neyht Subscriber²]

Mozillazine - Trim on Minimize this page explains the setting pretty well. BangBang is also correct--he knows what he's talking about.

It's a workaround for people who have extensions that leak memory, but won't let them go for one reason or another.

Personally, I would reccomend looking into what extensions are causing the memory leak and seeking alternatives, or updating to an unofficial 1.5.0.2 build. However...this is a lot faster and easier.

Also, I think this was set to true on some versions of firefox 1.0.x, but is disabled in Firefox 1.5.

Anyone saying that firefox already does this, check to make sure you don't already have the line in your preferences and that you are using the most current build of Firefox.

Edited April 14, 2006 by Ned

[Tarzan]

Those who use minimize "trick" and cannot see any "lack of responsiveness" as Mozillazine says elsewhere (they vote to leave it disabled) also knows what they are talking about :cool: I think he was replying to a 500+mb -> 10-20mb situation not dismissing this in general cause it will for sure make Firefox go zzzzzz when restoring GUI and tabs. Not the way it works but possible buggy extensions/webpages/java or other evil giving 500mb will be best left alone - until it dies completely. Also there could be differences in how restoring Firefox feels depending on ram, computer speed.

[drgrudge]

Is there any way that I can remove the thing that added in the about:config? It doesn't seem to work and I don't want anything to happen.

[The_Decryptor Veteran]

When you add the preference or change it, it adds a like to a .js file in your profile (userpref.js or something)

Now, Firefox has memory leaks (all app's do), but the inflated RAM usage isn't a memory leak, it's due to the way windows handles application caching (Firefox doesn't have the issue on OS X or Linux for example), and Firefox will free memory if Windows needs it.

the trim_on_minimize simply forces Firefox to page everything to disk every time you minimize it, it doesn't make Firefox use less ram (it shifts everything to VM ram), and when you maximise it it reads everything out of VM ram back to memory, that is slow (more pages you have open, slower it takes).

[r01n3]

Just wanted to say thanx for this awesome tweak,thanx!

My firefox runs under 10 000KB now maximized.

It varies a little from which website I'm on though,when I'm on Neowin

it uses around 20 000KB.

;)

[Fred Derf Veteran]

Your Firefox memory useage has always been less when FF was minimized, chances are you've just never checked it maximized vs. minimized before.

Without this patch installed:

I've got 137MB when maximized and.... wait for it... 137MB when minimized.

Now it's 133MB. Go figure.

Edit:

That seemed a bit strange to me. FireFox (actually Bon Echo) has been running for days but still. I quit FF and reloaded it and with only the Google start page it was taking 122MB. So I quit FF and I noticed that there was still an instance in my Task Manager so I killed it. When I launched FF again it was taking 20MB.

I also just upgraded from Bon Echo to Minefield so we'll see how that goes.