How do I put Firefox on a diet?

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How do I put Firefox on a diet?

Postby Crescent Pulsar S » Sun Nov 05, 2017 10:18 pm

halp.jpg
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I haven't been able to figure out how to stop it from eating so much of my resources, particularly since it causes things to lag when doing anything. Well, short of shutting the browser down and starting anew (and seeing it build up again). I've tried clearing the cache (limited to 50Mb to begin with), closing tabs that have plenty of history to go back to, and I get no change when the only thing is a blank window from opening a new tab.

Anyone know what I can do to stop this from happening?
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Re: How do I put Firefox on a diet?

Postby Knight of L-sama » Mon Nov 06, 2017 3:08 am

Perhaps running a script blocker? I was having similar problems and was getting a lot of "A script on this page stopped working" errors so I installed a script blocker and haven't had those problems since.
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Re: How do I put Firefox on a diet?

Postby Spica75 » Mon Nov 06, 2017 12:16 pm

Crescent Pulsar S wrote:
halp.jpg


I haven't been able to figure out how to stop it from eating so much of my resources, particularly since it causes things to lag when doing anything. Well, short of shutting the browser down and starting anew (and seeing it build up again). I've tried clearing the cache (limited to 50Mb to begin with), closing tabs that have plenty of history to go back to, and I get no change when the only thing is a blank window from opening a new tab.

Anyone know what I can do to stop this from happening?


From the start you should know that FF is specifically made to be low on resources used(last time someone tested, it was in fact the browser that took up the least RAM), and that even my FF window that have been active for several days is yet to ever reach that level of RAM usage, and i have 32GB of RAM total so it's not like it's trying to save it for later. A quick check at my FF cache shows that it uses 644MB.

closing tabs that have plenty of history to go back to


Wont matter. The amount of RAM this uses is less than a kB.

I've tried clearing the cache (limited to 50Mb to begin with)


Shouldn't matter. You might even consider increasing the cachesize.

and I get no change when the only thing is a blank window from opening a new tab.


Does it jump to that if you close it completely and restart it? FF is generally very reliable, but it is still possible that you somehow stumbled onto a previously unknown memory leak.


Does it also use up a lot of CPU cycles?


Anyway, you could try this:
Type about:config in the Firefox address bar
Search for browser.sessionhistory.max_entries
Double click on the value 50, change it to something lower, 5 should be good.

It changes how many "recently visited" sites it tries to keep in memory to speed up when you load them. It's not certain to make a difference at all, but in some cases it can change resources used massively(depends mostly on how the sites you visit look codewise).

And here's FFs own checklist, go through it and see if you find anything:
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/fi ... memory-ram
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