BlogRodent: Pentecostal Rumination & Review

As I mentioned previously, my workhorse laptop was stolen late December, 2006. Since then I’ve been using a much older laptop circa 1988. Okay, it’s not that old, but it’s a Pentium 4 with only 500 MB of RAM … and it turns out, my Firefox browser occasionally likes to suck up about 3-400 MB of that RAM in one sitting.

Of course, that might have something to do with all 47 of my favorite extensions (”My Firefox on crack: the best extensions I could find“).

Every time I install Firefox on a new machine, I wind up tweaking its registry settings to improve its page-load time and network connections to give me a better browsing experience. This time I needed to do the same thing, but also minimize some of the RAM I’m using. While doing the research for my tweaks, I thought I’d share my results with you in case you’re interested and brave enough to muddle around in the Firefox about:config settings. Also, I wanted to save my notes on my blog so I won’t have to trawl the Net again the next time ’round.

If you do make any of these changes to your Firefox installation, please don’t contact me for support. I’m not a techie, I only played one at my last job.

Remove extensions

First things first, you can easily reduce considerable memory overhead by uninstalling all your extensions. Okay, so maybe you’re addicted to all your cool tools. I know I am. But there are some you should be wary of anyhow, as they’re known to “leak” memory — meaning the longer you have Firefox open the more memory they consume. There are a few lists describing the usual suspects, but you should know that extension developers are usually trying to beat a bad rap, so keep checking in for updates to the extension: Known Leaky Extensions.

Forget your history

Next, reduce the number of days your Firefox tracks your browsing. The more you track, the more memory Firefox apparently uses. Change this by going to Tools » Options » Privacy » History. I set my history to three days.

Modify your configuration

Go to your Firefox location bar and type about:config and hit Enter. You’ll get a crazy table of techie-looking names on the left and numbers and options on the right. This is the complete output of all your Firefox configuration settings. Depending on what extensions and themes you have installed, yours will look different than mine. To change a configuration item, you only need to doubleclick on the setting you want to change, and a box will pop up with the current setting plugged in. To change it, you just edit the value (if it’s an integer or a string) and click OK. If the setting was “boolean” (meaning either “true” or “false”), double-clicking will automatically change the setting to the opposite value.

Before changing a setting, I usually search for it so I can isolate it from all the other settings around it. To search for a specific value, you just enter the configuration “Preference Name” in the “Filter” bar near the top of the table. Just pasting in the name will isolate the value you’re interested in.

Doing this before changing a value provides a couple of benefits for me: 1) I don’t inadvertently double-click on the wrong neighboring setting by accident. And 2) I find out immediately whether a particular settng actually exists in my configuration or not. Some of the config settings below may not exist in your particular installation, so you’ll have to create them.

To create a config setting, just right click in the table area, select “New” in the context menu that pops up, then select whether you are creating a “String,” “Integer,” or “Boolean” value. A string value is used for things like path names and alphanumeric characters. Integer settings are pure numbers. Boolean settings are either “True” or “False.” (For more info, see “About:Config entries” at the Mozilla Knowledge Base.)

These are the settings I modified to make my Firefox a little faster and more reliable on a machine with little memory. Your mileage may vary. Be sure to check out my resources at the end for more information. I’ve linked each preference name to the Mozilla Knowledge Base for further reading.

Choice about:config settings

Preference name: browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers
Type: Integer
Value: 2

Preference name: config.trim_on_minimize
Type: Boolean
Value: true

Preference name: content.notify.backoffcount
Type: Integer
Value: 5

Preference name: content.notify.interval
Type: Integer
Value: 120000

Preference name: content.notify.ontimer
Type: Boolean
Value: true

Preference name: network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server
Type: Integer
Value: 8

Preference name: network.http.pipelining
Type: Boolean
Value: true

Preference name: network.http.pipelining.maxrequests
Type: Integer
Value: 8

Preference name: network.http.max-connections
Type: Integer
Value: 60

Preference name: network.http.max-connections-per-server
Type: Integer
Value: 15

Preference name: nglayout.initialpaint.delay
Type: Integer
Value: 0

Preference name: plugin.expose_full_path
Type: Integer
Value: true

Preference name: browser.cache.memory.enable
Type: Boolean
Value: true

Preference name: browser.cache.memory.capacity
Type: Integer
Value: 4096

Preference name: browser.cache.disk_cache_ssl
Type: Boolean
Value: true

Hope this helps! I know it helped me.

Rich

Resources used to compile this list:

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The machine does this. Your mileage may vary