How in the Tech

Keep Firefox’s memory in check with Memory Fox

By Adam Myers ⋅ March 16, 2010 ⋅ Tags: Firefox, Optimization

The web browser market is quite mature and stable; developers are struggling to innovate and introduce features that are actually useful for anymore than a handful of their user base. Users expect newer versions with new features of their software, not just with their browser. An expansion of features often comes with a price – not just on the wallet but the performance of the system as a whole. Adding features isn’t free to the system – it’s a constant struggle to balance performance vs features. We users are a fickle group, expecting the world with little leniency to other matters. There typically isn’t much give and take – do you fit this mold?

Firefox started it’s life as a lean and mean browser but over the years, as more and more functionality is packed in, many feel the browser has become a bit heavy and bloated, at least with respect to it’s memory usage. While it is true that in Firefox 2, the browser suffered some memory issues, typically centered around leaks, and many users found a drop in memory consumption during browsing sessions once they upgraded to Firefox 3. Still, for many, the memory floor so to speak was acceptable, but the ceiling remained a problem. While Firefox wouldn’t slowly leak and bleed memory from the system, it was still consuming vast amounts of system memory with just a few tabs open.

Users annoyed by this behavior have a few options. They could switch to a competing browser; limit the amount of open tabs; or even close Firefox when they are finished – keeping the memory ceiling from climbing too high. Another option is available and it is called Memory Fox.

Memory Fox is a memory utilization optimizer for Firefox 3 that can monitor and flush the memory cache within the browser once certain thresholds are reached. How and what exactly does Memory Fox accomplish this? From the developers website:

“Memory Fox”, focuses on two ( 2 ) types of memory usage and with flushing for memory recovery. When resource requirements ( Stack and Heap ) have been reached, according to the user’s preset option settings, the memory will be flushed and recovered from Fragmented Orphaned ram memories.
Below are the two types supported for recovery.

1. Working Set: The set of memory pages currently visible to the process and is [ Shareable ] between other processes.

2. Private Working Set: The set of memory pages currently visible to the process and is [ Non Sharable ] between other processes.

Once downloaded and installed, the Firefox extension must be enabled from the Tools menubar item in Firefox. You should see the Memory Fox icon turn green in your Firefox status bar once enabled.

Memory Fox has a number of configurable options but for most the defaults are more than suitable.

In my testing, Memory Fox accomplished what it said it would do. That is, the memory utilization of the Firefox process in Task Manager rarely crept high and when it did, it would quickly return to a more palatable number.

Memory Fox is worth a trial especially on systems constrained by limited system memory. However, in my testing, while visually the extension proved it’s worth – I did not notice any improvement within the browser or the system as a whole. I would caution that this is likely a result of having plenty of available memory and not any indication of Memory Fox being being useless.

Download Memory Fox