Firemin

11.8.3.8398

Small utility to reduce the amount of memory Firefox or other browsers use.

Overview

Firemin is a small utility to reduce the amount of memory Firefox or other browsers use. Although Firefox memory usage improved a little over the last few years, it still uses a lot of memory; a little more than we feel comfortable with.

Memory Leaks

Programs on my computer can stay open and run for days or even weeks, and Firefox is no exception. Because of this Firefox was using over 3 GB of memory after a few days. It's quite normal for Firefox to be sucking up over 250 MB of memory right off the bat. In a memory leak, you'll see the memory usage keeps increasing the longer the program is open/in use and this is exactly what happens with Firefox.

Enter Firemin

Simply put, Firemin will attempt to eliminate Firefox memory leaks and decrease the amount of memory Firefox uses. All I did was tweak our Memory Booster a little and applied it to Firefox and this solved the memory leak issues.

Firemin vs. Windows Memory Management

Windows will also periodically scan running processes and tell them to release their unused memory. You could argue that this makes Firemin unnecessary, and you would be spot on. However, It is my opinion that Windows does not clean out memory as often as I would like it to. Firemin runs the clean memory API call a few times per second.

The method Firemin uses to decrease Firefox memory usage is not proven and the debate over if it works or not will go on until the end of time, but the logic remains; if it works for you, use it and if it does not, don't use it. It is really that simple.