Tuning the Firefox prerendering cache!

[Floid]

Of interest to... probably everyone, TheInq unveils the heretefore undocumented knob.  For 1.5, at least.

See the blog entry directly for a muddled discussion of specifics.

Note that this system probably works great on systems with fast swap, and horribly on those without (contrast throughput from a modern 80GB+ disk with its own 8MB prefetch cache to the old 2GB Barracuda I use to avoid OOM-kills on my FreeBSD box).  Pessimizing the prerendered caching will result in rerendering from cached HTML/image objects/etc, which moves the load from the disk to the CPU (where you might've expected it),

Lots of discussion of other leakiness and so on in the comments.

[Tomas]

The memory leak issues of firefox has been so bad for me that i only use firefox under windows and have instead switched to konqueror on linux.

I have pretty modern amd64 system with 1gig of ram, but still it manages to eat up all my ram after a day or so, which causes the system to start swapping and this will cause the whole OS to slow down to a crawl. The only fix is to completly quit firefox and start it again, which is really no solution for me. I believe tha this cache feature is just a small part of the problem.

I have noticed this problem using older versions of firefox on different systems as well, but it has gotten more noticable with newer releases.

Also moz team tends to blame the problem on extensions and such, but i run zero extension on my firefox 1.5.1 and the problem is still there and so do alot of other people claim as well.

[Floid]

I think part of the leaks on *NIX may be related to X server behavior (and possibly SysV IPC), but I haven't done much analysis in a while.