dennis yang dot com

For the past few weeks, my computer had been acting more and more sluggish with each day… and I couldn’t figure out what the hell was going on. I mean, yes, I usually have a ton of windows open, but I kind of need to with the amount of multi-tasking that I do…

I figured that the digital detritus was just building up from over two years of use and my laptop was just in need of a wipe and rebuild.. But, I don’t really have time to do that (nor do we have an IS dept to handle that kind of task)..

So, last night, after a night of sitting around, I awoke to find my laptop in a frozen catatonic state. Ugh. I did a hard reboot, and was horrified to find that it wouldn’t even start up anymore. I turned it off, booted into the IBM restore function, looked around a bit, and then restarted again, and then thankfully it started up again. But, sensing that whatever caused my laptop to zombie was still lurking around, I did a little digging around. My hard disk sure was frag’d crazy, but come on, that couldn’t be the cause of the problems…

I found that whenever I started up Firefox, it used like 208mb of memory… even with just one window open. Hmm.. that’s not quite right. Talking to Mike, his FF only uses like 80mb even when he has like 8 tabs open, so something is definitely not right.. Some googling came up with some fixes that just seemed too drastic to be the right fix, so I dug around my settings for a bit.. And then I found the culprit…

I had set the “Remember visited pages” setting to 999 days. Hmmmm.. could that be it? I mean.. Firefox couldn’t possibly be storing 999 days of my browsing history in memory, could it? Sure, I’ll give it a try… I remember that I changed that cuz it seemed like a good idea at the time.

I set it to 30 days.. and.. VOILA!! Memory usage is now down to 50mb.. Woooohoooo…

Seriously, that setting should come with some sort of warning or something… Anyway, hopefully this post will serve as a warning to others so that I’m not the only one that is shooting myself in the foot.

This should teach me a lesson not to be such a packrat… Speaking of which, I really need to clean out my closet.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 15th, 2007 at 9:39 am and is filed under geeky. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.