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My Firefox seems to be getting very laggy lately and this used to happen on my older computer when I was low on memory, however I checked and I have plenty of memory still available but it's still laggy, so I'm wondering do I perhaps have to increase the memory it's allowed to use?

By laggy I mean it has the same visual effect as lag, in that when you're interacting with the screen things "lag" / get stuck / appear slow - nothing to do with page load time.

I did a little digging and found this almost 12 year old thread; so I'm wondering does what is mentioned there still apply now?

Namely, by going to about:config in the address bar and then adding the configuration setting browser.cache.memory.capacity and giving it a value of the amount of memory it's allowed to use in Kb's?

If not, is there a way to do this?

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  • if your cpu is slow there is no connection between heavy javascripts and memory usage.
    – Ipor Sircer
    Commented Oct 27, 2016 at 16:56
  • @IporSircer No, my CPU is not slow.
    – Brett
    Commented Oct 27, 2016 at 16:58
  • increasing the cache "memory" is just going to increase or decrease the amount of cache Firefox manages it will not actually increase or decrease the amount of system memory Firefox can use. Can you be more descriptive then "its still laggy", because "lag", is latency and has nothing to do with Firefox using system memory.
    – Ramhound
    Commented Oct 27, 2016 at 17:33
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    use about:memory or addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/task-manager to see which addon uses most RAM.
    – magicandre1981
    Commented Oct 28, 2016 at 14:52

2 Answers 2

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The link in your question was from 12 years ago. Webpages in 2016 use a lot more memory than they did in 2004. To get rid of lagging and video stuttering in Firefox type about:config in the Firefox address bar and change the following preferences:

  • browser.cache.disk.enable true
  • browser.cache.disk.capacity 358400
  • browser.cache.disk.smart_size_cached_value 358400

This is all the browser cache that you need to improve Firefox's performance if you are watching standard definition videos, and adding more won't help unless you are watching high definition videos in Firefox.

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My use case: I already use a swap memory from the disk to boost my system's RAM, so I don't really case about Firefox writing to my SSD for caching. I like to open +100 tabs easily. I've peaked to ~350 once. After my system update to Ubuntu 20.04 Firefox started to be unstable after ~60 active tabs.

@karel's answer did led me in the right direction. But I think from 2016 to 2023 the requirements changed a bit more :D

Using Firefox's own Task Manager (More tools > Task Manager | or simply shortcut: Shift+Esc) will show you your current situation and possible needs.

I configured my settings for Firefox *4 the peak needs I was facing issues with, though you will surely need a bit of system memory available for this in the worst case.

The configs can be found where @karel points: browser.cache.disk that can be reached under about:config. Under config, I changed browser.cache.disk.amount_written and browser.cache.disk.capacity don't know if both were required but they did seem to make the trick.

Cheers

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