Tag Archives: memory

Firefox 3 – Uses Huge amounts of Ram and is slow – Solutions

I love Firefox heck who doest with the fantastic features it has but Firefox 3 is so slow it seems to take ages compared to FireFox 2 and really its just not good enough. Ive tried everything to get it work a bit better, made a new profile etc and did some searching for a solution.

It also seems that Firefox uses a huge amount of ram up to 400mb of ram on my PC and thats not unique according to the searches ive done. Ive found an addon that seems to reduce the crazy amount of ram that Firefox Uses;

AFOM – Memory Recovery & Retention For Firefox
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/11922

Im using this addon at the moment and it does seem to work even for the latest FireFox version. There are other Tweeks and solutions on the problem and ive listed some of them below.

  1. Firefox Running Slow? Make It Fast Again Without Re-Installation
  2. Is Firefox slow for you? Here’s some tips to try which might speed it up
  3. Firefox slow? Limit history size for speed improvement
  4. This May Help Your Firefox Memory Leak

This page comes up with a FireFox tweek that ive not yet tested but it might just do the trick;

This little fix will move Firefox to your hard drive when you minimize it, and as a result it will take up less than 10MB of memory while minimized. So far, from my experiences with using this today, when you maximize Firefox it will obviously increase the memory usage. However, it does not seem to go back up to the insane amount that it was at before minimizing it. For example, Firefox was at 180MB of memory usage and then I minimized it and after a few seconds I maximized it. After maximizing it and continuing on my routine business it appeared to only have gone up to 60MB. This seems to be a good solution for me right now since I frequently maximize and minimize Firefox anyways.

  • Open Firefox and go to the Address Bar. Type in about:config and then press Enter.
  • Right Click in the page and select New -> Boolean.
  • In the box that pops up enter config.trim_on_minimize. Press Enter.
  • Now select True and then press Enter.
  • Restart Firefox.