Computer questions and solutions....thereof...

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Johnj · #21 Unread post by **Johnj** » Thu Jan 18, 2007 7:11 am

I use Firefox for everything except Windows© Updates.

Nalian · #22 Unread post by **Nalian** » Thu Jan 18, 2007 8:20 am

Avoid the weather extension for firefox - it'll slow it down majorly and cause it to crash or eat up memory for no reason.

#23 Unread post by **Sev** » Thu Jan 18, 2007 9:06 am

Nalian wrote:Avoid the weather extension for firefox - it'll slow it down majorly and cause it to crash or eat up memory for no reason.

It seems to be running faster for me now that I've got the weather extension installed. LoL. However said extension will obviously eat up bandwidth and processing power just by being there. I like it though.

jonnythan · Thu Jan 18, 2007 9:14 am

Every extension you load will use up some memory and slow down the starting of Firefox, so I use as few as possible. One or two extra small ones may not be noticeable, but it does become so when you have upwards of 5-10 extensions installed, or if you have a small number of resource-intensive ones.

I also use Fasterfox. It noticeably speeds up the loading of many web pages.

Fasterfox and Adblock are the only ones I use. ScriptMonkey is also very nice, but most usable to more advanced users.

Nalian · #25 Unread post by **Nalian** » Thu Jan 18, 2007 9:19 am

Sevulturus wrote:
Nalian wrote:Avoid the weather extension for firefox - it'll slow it down majorly and cause it to crash or eat up memory for no reason.
It seems to be running faster for me now that I've got the weather extension installed. LoL. However said extension will obviously eat up bandwidth and processing power just by being there. I like it though.

Leave it running overnight. I would have to kill firefox in the morning because it would go from eating 60 or so megs of memory to 260. It was nuts.

Admittedly, like in all software testing to say conclusively I'd have to install it on more systems and such. But I definitely have better results with firefox after getting rid of it.

#26 Unread post by **Sev** » Thu Jan 18, 2007 9:30 am

I'm a big fan of grease monkey myself, it allows on the fly user side editing of any webpage that you view. Very cool.

As for weather network... I've had it installed for maybe 12 hours now. I've yet to notice any slow down, even while playing high demand online games with it running in the background. I might just have a newer version of the addon then the one you tested, or it may have interacted funny with one of your hardware components (I play WoW and the last patch 1/4ed my frame rate because I had a creative card. Remove the card and frame rate goes back... newest patch fixed this). Who knows? Computers are so messed up.

Nalian · #27 Unread post by **Nalian** » Thu Jan 18, 2007 9:46 am

Nope - same version has been out since September. I didn't start having problems right away, but more just a week or so ago (firefox was installed on a fresh OS about 3/4 weeks ago). It's possible that it didn't like being installed with the other extensions I was running - but like I said I didn't notice issues right away. I started noticing all kinds of problems with firefox (such as it wouldn't let me click on my tabs, but I could ctrl-alt to them) and was getting pretty frustrated til I uninstalled just forecastfox. Since then..no problems.

As always with computers, YMMV.

jonnythan · Thu Jan 18, 2007 10:23 am

Firefox is designed to slowly eat up a significant chunk of memory. This is not a memory leak. It stores a large portion of the pages you visit in RAM instead of in its cache.

You can turn this off if you want. There's no reason to "kill" Firefox periodically.

If you want to do this, type about:config in the address bar and hit enter. Right click and select New -> Boolean. Name the value config.trim_on_minimize and select True. Restart Firefox.

There. Minimal memory usage.

Nalian · #29 Unread post by **Nalian** » Thu Jan 18, 2007 11:10 am

If you're commenting in my direction, jonnythan, the memory leak I was experiencing was due to forecast fox. That has been the only thing that changed, and since then it hasn't happened again. No that's not a 'conclusive' test, but I'm not willing to put it back on my system and run tests for something I don't care that much about.

Again..we're talking 200 megs in the course of 12-20 or so hours while no one was using the machine. No new pages, etc.

jonnythan · Thu Jan 18, 2007 12:26 pm

Nalian wrote:If you're commenting in my direction, jonnythan, the memory leak I was experiencing was due to forecast fox.

I realized that after I posted, but thought I'd leave the comment up because Firefox *does* indeed use hundreds of megabytes of memory over time. Lots of people think that this is some sort of memory leakage bug with Firefox, but it's actually intentional.. so I thought I'd leave the "fix" up for those interested.