Firefox Memory Leak workaround tip

[DaBees-Knees]

http://www.slyck.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=47333

I know that there are a few Firefox users out there. I hope you find this handy.

Thought I'd share this for anyone who experiences the old recurring Firefox memory leak issue.

To be fair to Mozilla a lot of these issues are probably caused by add-ons (I use a fair number of add-ons myself, and I haven't bothered disabling each and every one of them individually to diagnose this), but this issue does seem to get fixed every so often, then another FF update later, it's back again.

I have found that this is a great workaround, and it saves having to restart FireFox each time it runs away with your RAM.

This config makes FF release/trim RAM each time you minimise all your FF windows. This is also good for freeing up RAM without losing pages you are browsing. Just open Task Manager to see the results - I usually see FF memory usage drop from 200MB+ (and sometimes over 600MB!) to around 20MB when minimised

This is the setting:
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Config.trim_on_minimize

It doesn't exist by default, so here's what to do to add it:


1) Go to about:config (in the FF address bar)
2) Right-click somewhere on the list and select New -> Boolean
3) Enter config.trim_on_minimize and set its value to True
4) Restart Firefox

In theory, this should make Firefox slower to minimise/restore, but I find there is no noticeable lack of performance.

So there you have it. I hope it helps.