Firefox Memory Leak is a Feature

SenseOfHumor writes "The Firefox memory leak is not a bug. It's a feature! The 'feature' is how the pages are cached in a tabbed environment." From the article: "To improve performance when navigating (studies show that 39% of all page navigations are renavigations to pages visited less than 10 pages ago, usually using the back button), Firefox 1.5 implements a Back-Forward cache that retains the rendered document for the last five session history entries for each tab. This is a lot of data. If you have a lot of tabs, Firefox's memory usage can climb dramatically. It's a trade-off. What you get out of it is faster performance as you navigate the web."

Comments

At least it can be changed...

[The-Bus]

From TFA:

For those who remain concerned, here's how the feature works. Firefox has a preference browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers which by default is set to -1. No more than 8 pages per tab are ever cached in this fashion, by default. If you set this preference to another value, e.g. 25, 25 pages will be cached for every tab. You can set it to 0 to disable the feature, but your page load performance will suffer.

For those that don't know or remember, the preference is accessed by typing about:config in Firefox's address bar. Let's see if there's still a leak after you change the option. I know when I close tabs the memory usage doesn't go down.

Re:Crap

[4D6963]

It indeed was in TFA.

You just have to set browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers to 0 in about:config, apparently