By Thilak February 26, 2007

Speed up Firefox by Improving Memory Usage

You might have noticed that Firefox performs poorly when you surf for a long time or open lots of tabs at once. Many wrongly believe that this is due to some memory leak caused by extensions (even, I used to believe this). This is actually caused because Firefox stores 50 most recently visited websites in a memory session inorder to speed up the pageload of the previously visited site.

Average web surfer tend to visit only 3 – 5 websites out of the previously visited websites, so you can reduce the resource hog by changing the memory threshold to 5 (or anything below 50). This can be done by typing ‘about:config’ in your Firefox address bar and search for ‘browser.sessionhistory.max_entries’ (without quotes), right click on that entry and choose modify. Now set the value for 5 (or anything lower than 50).

I first read this trick on Ghack and then I tried it myself. It made my Firefox work smoothly for longer.

Via Jayaprakash

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Discussion

Comments for “Speed up Firefox by Improving Memory Usage”

  • I hop this works. I browse hundreds a day and get that slowdown.

    Thanks!
  • Thanks for the tip mate. I'm unsure if I saw an immediate performance hit but will see during my next browser session.
  • Thanks for the tip!!!
    I could see the improvements right away!
  • It Really worked for me Thilak.Nice Trick :)
  • Bryan: yup, I guess you'll have to restart Firefox for the changes to reflect.

    Anirudh: We will be glad if you share them with us :D

    Abhishek: But, that will remove everything, including my saved password, history and cache files.
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