Automatically Restart Firefox On High Memory Usage

High memory usage can slow down a program or the operating system. While I personally never experienced that in Firefox on my computer systems, I know of users who did and still do. Finding the cause for the high memory usage in Firefox would obviously be the best solution for the issue. Sometimes though that is not possible.

The next best thing is a solution that mitigates the issue. Some Firefox users close and re-open the browser regularly to flush and reset the web browser’s memory use. Others install add-ons that optimize memory usage of Firefox or perform other operations that reduce the browser’s use of memory.

Memory Restart is one of those add-ons. It is a fairly simple add-on that displays the browser’s current memory utilization in the status bar. The add-on highlights below peak memory usage in red.

A left-click on the icon displays a restart prompt. A click on yes restarts the browser, no closes the prompt without actions being taken.

Memory used by the browser is not updated in realtime, the program seems to update the count once per minute.

The information alone would be useful enough, but Memory Restart brings another feature to the table that might even be more to the liking of Firefox users with memory issues.

The extension can restart the browser automatically if the memory usage goes through the default memory threshold of 500Mb.

This default threshold can be changed in the program’ options. Here it is furthermore possible to enable the automatic restart option when the limit is reached by the browser. This happens without notification or user interaction. A countdown or notification option could improve the process to give Firefox users enough time to save their work on the web before the browser is restarted by the extension.

Firefox users can download Memory Restart from the official Mozilla Firefox add-on repository.

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© Martin Brinkmann for gHacks Technology News | Latest Tech News, Software And Tutorials, 2011. | Permalink |
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Mozilla Firefox Will Become More Memory Efficient

The Mozilla Firefox web browser has quite the bad image when it comes to memory efficiency. You see claims all over the Internet that the browser is eating up more memory than other browsers. Comparisons often are not entirely fair to begin with, considering that most Firefox users have their fair share of add-ons installed in the browser which add to the browser’s overall memory consumption.

With Firefox 8 being released the minutes we speak, it is time to look at the improvements that Mozilla has in store for Firefox users. I have already covered the planned changes of Firefox 9, and the big JavaScript performance boost of that version in detail.

More interesting in regards to the browser’s memory efficiency and footprint are Firefox 10, or maybe Firefox 11. Firefox 10, which is currently available as a Nightly release (think of it as regularly released alpha versions that are not suitable for productive environments, may be the version of the browser that changes the user perception from a memory eating browser to a slim and efficient one.

Firefox developer Nicholas Nethercote some days ago detailed the changes that Mozilla has in store for the upcoming versions of the browser. According to Nicholas, the JavaScript engine is often the component of the browser that is “responsible for consuming the most memory”.

What Nicholas describes then are pages of “programmers-talk” about how Mozilla intents to reduce the browser’s footprint by optimizing various components and technologies of the browser’s JavaScript engine.

Probably the biggest news here is the retirement of the JavaScript engine TraceMonkey which will reduce the browser’s overall memory footprint and make the Firefox itself a smaller program. Jaegermonkey for the time being will become the only Just-In-Time compiler of Firefox. This again will change in the near future with the introduction of IonMonkey, a JIT compiler that is said to “generate code that is not only much faster, but much smaller”.

Mozilla developers are furthermore experimenting with technologies that reduce the overall size of JavaScript compartments in the browser. Some of the improvements promise great memory reductions. Luke Wagner’s proposition to reduce parts of scripts that are never run could reduce the “script-data” usage of the browser by up to 70%. Objects in SpiderMonkey, represented by JSObjects may see a size reduction of about 60%, while Shapes, another important data structure, will see optimizations that take them from 40 or 64 bytes to 24 or 40 bytes.

The majority of those memory optimizations will likely land in Firefox 10 or Firefox 11. Firefox users who now head over to the Nightly repository to download the latest Firefox 10 version right away will notice that the browser is not really showing any memory footprint improvements right now. Improving the browser’s memory efficiency is a work in progress.

What’s your take on browser memory consumption and speed? Is Firefox really that heavy on RAM usage?

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© Martin Brinkmann for gHacks Technology News | Latest Tech News, Software And Tutorials, 2011. | Permalink |
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Post tags: firefox 10, firefox 11, firefox memory usage, mozilla-firefox

Dormancy, Unload Firefox Tabs To Free RAM

The Firefox web browser is still perceived by many as a RAM eater and a program that pushes RAM usage on many configurations to the limit. When you analyze that you may come to a different conclusion though. Lifehacker recently ran some – limited and non scientific – tests with the result that Chrome and Internet Explorer used both more RAM than Firefox.

The developers of Firefox have started to implement features in the browser to improve its memory usage and performance. Among the features introduced is one that prevents the loading of all tabs during session restore on browser start up. This can speed up browser start up considerable and reduce the initial RAM use as well.

A very similar feature is planned for upcoming Firefox versions. The developers plan to integrate a feature into the browser that unloads tabs in the browser after an inactivity period. This would free up memory but also mean that it would take longer to activate the tab again.

If you are like me you have some websites open in tabs for safe keepeing. Sites that you do not want to add to your bookmarks. I do that a lot for sites or software that I want to write about.

The Firefox add-on Dormancy adds the future Firefox feature to current versions of the browser. The developer states that it should be considered an experimental add-on that could cause issues on some systems.

The add-on unloads tabs after five minutes of inactivity. Firefox users can change the interval in the Firefox about:config configuration, which is a highly unusual place for configuration modifications.

The extensions.dormancy.TabDormancyAgeMs preference defines the time tabs need to be inactive to be unloaded, the preference extensions.dormancy.TabCheckIntervalMs the checking interval. Both values are set to five minutes by default.

The tab title of all unloaded tabs begins with data: so that it is always clear which tabs have been unloaded and which are still active.

The extension works considerably well. Users may experience small lags from time to time. This happened infrequently on my Windows test system.

How beneficial is the add-on? Firefox with nine active tabs and a handful of add-ons used about 280 Megabytes of RAM on the test system. With three tabs unloaded this dropped to 262 Megabytes. The gain obviously depends largely on the contents of those tabs The strange thing though is that you won’t always see a gain, or reduction in RAM to be precise. It is usually easier to restart the browser for a larger reduction of RAM use by the web browser.

The second issue that I have with the add-on is that it adds a feature to the browser that is going to be implemented natively at one point in time. If you are desperate and need RAM it might be worth a try, if not it is probably better to wait until it is implemented natively.

Firefox users can download the Dormancy add-on from the official Mozilla Firefox add-on repository. (via)

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© Martin Brinkmann for gHacks Technology News | Latest Tech News, Software And Tutorials, 2011. | Permalink |
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Post tags: dormancy, Firefox, firefox add-ons, firefox memory usage