====== Boost Firefox Performance ======
I've been using Firefox since before v1.0.  It is my favorite browser with a lot of great add-ons.  While Mozilla is continuously striving to improve stability and performance, they are still behind in some areas IMHO.  Personally, I feel the main area of improvement needed is in memory management.  Firefox has a tendency to ramp up memory utilization, but it never really goes down even after closing tabs.  It has gotten better, but until each tab gets a process I don't think it will be able to be fixed.  For now, here are a number of tweaks and tools to improve performance and memory usage.

===== Keep you opened tab count as low as possible =====
If you're running Windows 7 64 bit with only 4 GB's of RAM, keep it under 100 and restart it every few days.  If you're using a session manager, you will just have to log back in to some sites.

===== Reduce cache size =====
  - Click on the Firefox menu, and go to Options
  - Go to Advanced
  - Select the Network tab
  - Check the Override automatic cache management box
  - Set the cache size (I cut what Firefox had in half)
  - Click the OK button

===== Delete history =====
  - Click on the Firefox menu, and go to Options
  - Go to Privacy
  - Under History...
  - Click Clear your recent history
  - Expand Details
  - Select what you want to delete
  - Select the time frame from the dropdown
  - Click the Clear Now button
  - For a long term automatic cleansing
  - Set to Use custom settings for history or Never remember history
  - Check the boxes if you want history on those items
  - Check Clear history when Firefox closes
  - Click the Settings... button and then select the items you want Firefox to delete upon closting
  - Click the OK button

===== If you're using session and tab managers, reduce the number of closed tabs and the number of previous sessions =====

===== Disable prefetch to reduce HDD activity, or leave enabled to possibly improve related page load times =====

===== Speedyfox =====

[[http://www.crystalidea.com/speedyfox|http://www.crystalidea.com/speedyfox]]

===== What did NOT help =====
These are some other things I read about that said would help, but didn't really work for me.

==== Minimem ====
This allows you to reduce the memory footprint of running applications.  It appeared to work, but Firefox was fighting to get the memory it needed and this caused some lag.</ br>
[[http://main.kerkia.com/Tools/Minimem/Download.aspx|http://main.kerkia.com/Tools/Minimem/Download.aspx]]

==== RAMdisk ====
It almost seemed to make matters worse.  The delays and hangs did not go away.  I did not like the fact that Avast found it suspicious as well.</ br>
[[http://memory.dataram.com/products-and-services/software/ramdisk|http://memory.dataram.com/products-and-services/software/ramdisk]]

-- Main.FredPettis - 2012-03-21