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

This post was published by on February 26, 2007

About the Author: Thilak Rao works as a Social Media Expert. He is one of the first professional bloggers from India, and he loves to write, travel and click photos. Follow him on Twitter @thilak

  • http://www.sankaranand.com Sankar Anand

    Thanks for the Tricks thilak

  • http://www.liveopedia.com Phalgun

    Nice trick.

  • http://bryansrants.com/ Bryan

    I have given it a shot. We will see what happens. I am assuming you have to restart Firefox for this to take place?

  • http://www.anirudhsanjeev.org Anirudh

    One way I speeded up my firefox is by disabling the searching for updates at beginning. this really increased my start up speed.

    There are some other sweet firefox hacks.

  • http://abhishekbhatnagars.blogspot.com abhishek bhatnagar

    gr8 trick….but i suggest this thing can also be done by

    go to tools>Clear private data ,and check the appropriate boxes.

  • http://www.dailyblogtips.com Daniel

    Good info, if I am not wrong even the guys from This Week In Tech said that the problems were coming from memory leaks. I will try this tweak.

  • http://tech-buzz.net Thilak

    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.

  • http://techmantra.net Vikram

    It Really worked for me Thilak.Nice Trick :)

  • http://www.davidesalerno.net/2007/02/28/velocizzare-firefox-migliorando-lutilizzo-della-memoria/ Davide Salerno » Velocizzare Firefox migliorando l’utilizzo della memoria

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  • http://starcraft2log.blogspot.com/ StarCraft 2

    Thanks for the tip!!!
    I could see the improvements right away!

  • http://www.reallyreally.net/ Aussie Mum, Bree

    Thanks for the tip mate. I’m unsure if I saw an immediate performance hit but will see during my next browser session.

  • http://www.techflakes.com/2007/09/06/firefox-ecco-come-ridurre-il-consumo-di-memoria-ram/ Firefox, ecco come ridurre il consumo di memoria RAM! « Tech Flakes

    [...] Via | Tech-Buzz [...]

  • http://evtm.blogspot.com/ Donald B. Dousharm

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

    Thanks!