Firefox Memory Usage

This post is a tip for firefox users who often visit graphic intensive websites.

I recently noticed that when I went to bloglines and viewed my needlework subscriptions that my system would noticeably slow down. A quick trip to the task manager showed firefox (version 2.0.0.2) using 100MB of RAM and climbing. For some reason this only happens to me on one computer, but it's annoying all the same.

Solution: go to about:config and set browser.memory.cache.enable to false.

The long story:
The reason for the large memory usage is that firefox caches the images along with the webpages. On graphic-intensive sites... like craft blogs... this can cause a lot of memory usage.

Firefox determines how much memory it can use to cache websites based on some configuration settings and the amount of RAM the system has. Since my set-up clearly wasn't producing desired memory management, I went to about:config and looked for some settings that might help this out. Unfortunately, the only configuration option I found was to turn off memory caching entirely. Since I have a very fast internet connection this is not a problem, but for slower connections this might impede web browsing performance.

After changing the setting and restarting the browser firefox's memory usage sits at a consistent 30MB.