So, a while ago I was running
Firefox, and noticed that it was running at about 120MB of memory. I really though this was a bit harsh (OK, I had like 10 tabs open), but still.
After a bit of
looking around I came across a tip (my apologies, it was so long ago I've forgotton where), about an about:config hack to reduce Firefox's memory requirement when it's minimised.
- In the address bar of Firefox, type about:config
- Add a new boolean value called config.trim_on_minimize
- Set this to True
Now, when Firefox minimised the memory went from 120MB down to 10MB. On maximising Firefox, the memory only went back up to
40MB! Result.
So what?
Well, I've recently been playing with
Songbird 0.1 preview. It's a great music player/library that appears to be growing into a truely great piece of software.
However, it's suffers from the same problem as Firefox. Memory utilisation after being left running for 48 hours was peaking at 118MB. Even when it wasn't running anything.
However, Songbird is built onto of the XUL framework, the same framework that Firefox is built on. Any it has an address bar :).
The same trick that worked on Firefox works on Songbird! Adding the config.trim_on_minimize reduced the memory requirement back to 10MB.
I hope this config change helps someone else.
Steve
