Fixing Firefox’s Voracious Appetite for Memory

Ok, so its not really a fix… more like a work around. But so far this seems to have worked to help throttle back the Firefox browser’s design to cache pages in memory:

1. Go the address bar of firefox (where the “http://” usually is entered) and type “about:config”
2. Look for “browser.cache.disk.capacity” and click on it.
3. Change the default 50000 to a lower value. It was recommended that if you have 512Mb RAM, you should set it to 15000.
4. Restart Firefox.

So far my memory consumption, with a ton of tabs “On”, has been hovering at 80Mb. Much better than the previous 240Mb it used to consume.

Originally from Lifehack. Along with that came 14 other great Firefox tips (here).

You might want to check out these related posts:

1. Hands-on: Firefox 2.0 beta 1
2. Firefox 2.0 is Bon Echo Alpha 1
3. FasterFox: A Firefox Must-have
4. Test that Memory
5. Neat Firefox Addons