A great post over at the Inside Firefox developer blog where the lead developer on the Firefox project talks about Firefox memory leak or “feature” and how to modify the settings to fix it. I run Camino in OS X exclusively and have applied the settings and have noticed a similar performance increase as I at any one time have 20-30 tabs in multiple windows open. Good stuff.
They speak about modifying the "browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers" in the "about:config" settings.
“What I think many people are talking about however with Firefox 1.5 is not really a memory leak at all. It is in fact a feature.
To improve performance when navigating (studies show that 39% of all page navigations are renavigations to pages visited < 10 pages ago, usually using the back button), Firefox 1.5 implements a Back-Forward cache that retains the rendered document for the last few session history entries. This can be a lot of data. It’s a trade-off. What you get out of it is faster performance as you navigate the web. “
February 20th, 2006 - 8:23 pm
This is very useful as my Firefox exceeds 200MB of RAM everytime I leave it open for about a day. Combine that with the horrible memory management of iTunes (especially with 1400 podcast items) and my box was 0wn3d in a matter of days *yikes*