Table of Contents
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
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
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
– Main.FredPettis - 2012-03-21