Garbage Collection

FireFox is a well-known memory hog, caching, but never letting go, memory as it runs. Eventually it uses all available memory, and Linux starts paging, which slows things down. Quitting FireFox does not release the memory. Is there anything that I can do, apart from rebooting, to reclaim memory that FireFox has cached during its operation? With 1 gb of RAM, I can fairly easily hit the paging limit after 1 or 2 days of operation. Rebooting is a minor annoyance, but if I could set up a cron job to free up some of the resources consumed by FireFox, I wouldn't have to reboot.

There is a FF add-on, AFOM, that does this, but only for Windows.

 

If you are not emotionally attached to firefox, try switching to opera.

 

Unfortunately, I am. :|

 

Even though I am also attached to it, the best choice for AAO is to switch to Opera or Chromium.

 

FireFox the original was pretty good, but 3.5 is a twin of IE in many respects. Google Chrome is now the best small browser out.

And just a note: Chromium is actual the name of the source code that created the browser properly named Google Chrome.

 

I wouldn't go so far to call FF twin of IE, but it is definitely slow on AAO's cheap SSD and small ram.

There is Chromium, open source browser (which I use on my machine) and then there is Chrome that's what Google does with chromium (though only thing I noticed was branding)

 

I run Ubuntu with two system monitor windows on the lower panel, showing processor activity and memory utilization. Since starting Chrome, the memory utilization is a flat line (about 22% of 1gb). With FF 3.5+, all available memory is generally used up after 4-6 hours of activity, and when it starts paging performance falls off a cliff. As long as I don't need flash support or video, Chrome is fine.

 

From https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Aspir ... %20Firefox
I cut...

Firefox tends to stall, halt or freeze for a few seconds while browsing. This is a result of Firefox writing indices that can grow to an impractical size. Limiting the size will result in increased performance.

* In "about:config" reduce "browser.history_expire_days" to say 7
* To reset any oversized caches and start from scratch locate the directory "~/.mozilla/firefox/?.default/" and delete large files with extension ".sqlite".

...which suggests you might improve performance after long periods of activity by taking these steps. (I have not tried this.) Then again this may not be connected with "all available memory is generally used up" as in the initial post.

 

Thanks for the pointer to the Ubuntu community page links on speeding up FF! After making these two changes:

FF seems much less ravenous, and actually surrenders some RAM when I quit. And, if feels a little snappier.

Also, as far as I can see (at least with 9.04) changing CONCURRENCY from none to shell had absolutely no effect on boot time, which has always been 50 seconds on my machine. I'm measuring from the time I hit return in the grub menu until the desktop appears and a network connection is established.

 

I just confirmed on my Mac that reducing the browser.cache.disk.capacity (I cut it in half) has a major and immediate impact on memory usage by FireFox.