I wrote about reclaiming memory from Firefox’s memory leak problem. But apparently this supposedly memory leak is really a feature:
Excerpt from the Slashdot article:
“The Firefox memory leak is not a bug. It’s a feature! The ‘feature’ is how the pages are cached in a tabbed environment.” From the article: “To improve performance when navigating (studies show that 39% of all page navigations are renavigations to pages visited less than 10 pages ago, usually using the back button), Firefox 1.5 implements a Back-Forward cache that retains the rendered document for the last five session history entries for each tab. This is a lot of data. If you have a lot of tabs, Firefox’s memory usage can climb dramatically. It’s a trade-off. What you get out of it is faster performance as you navigate the web.”
Someone on that thread also found a way to remedy this memory leak once and for all…
1. In the Firefox URL box, type
2. Look for
and set it to “0” (default should have been “-1” )
According to Firefox’s online documenation, setting the value to “0” disables page caching and will damatically increase the time it takes to go back to a page using the back/front buttons (yeah, if you on dialup). But the documentation also gives guidelines on what values to set for the level of page caching you can tolerate (proportion to the memory Firefox will use).