So what’s bloatware anyway, Part III

Source: 'Mozilla Links' Magazine / Percy Cabello

Firefox has memory issues. It’s undeniable. Keep Firefox for a few hours with some 15-20 tabs opened at a time, minding you own business and you will get Firefox to grab up to around 150MB. You may notice this or not depending on how much memory you have. 1 GB or better computer users most likely won’t notice it. Drop that to 512 MB and you will start looking for the culprit. Windows task manager will promptly finger Firefox and its sticky little hands covered in memory.

Fast back and forward navigation was added in Firefox 1.5 and it has been pointed as the most memory consuming features with good reason: by design it keeps in memory the last n pages you have visited in a tab so if you need to go back or forward the page will be rendered faster from memory than from the disk cache.

browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers is the preference (accessible via about:config) that controls how many pages to store. By default it is set to -1 which means Firefox will decide based on the total amount of memory found in your system. According to the mozillaZine Knowledge Base, these values are 3 for 256 MB systems, 5 for 512MB and 8 for 1Gb and better systems.

Continue here ...

---