Sludge

I've been semi-permanently exasperated by the increasingly poor performance of my PC for months now and have been trying, in a low-key way, to track down the culprit. My first suspicion was that I'd picked up a trojan, but after several scans with industry-standard utilities revealed nothing, I realised I'd have to look elsewhere.

That was back in March (did I mention this is a low-key activity?) and since then I've run a registry cleaner, which sped things up a bit after removing almost 500 bits of crap from my registry (quicker than a wholesale reinstall), and checked the memory for errors with the Windows Memory Diagnostic (no problems there). Sad to say, but the main culprit continues to be Firefox.

Read up on Firefox and you'll discover that they invested a lot of time and effort, when version 3 was young, in fixing a pile of memory leaks. What they didn't fix was Firefox's DESIGNED IN behaviour of hanging on to all the memory it has ever allocated, even when it's not using it. The unused memory is returned to Firefox's own heap, but not released back to the OS. The visible effect of this, if you run Firefox like I do (never less than 8 tabs open and occasionally twice that many, and the browser always open - sometimes for days on end), is that I regularly sit down at my PC first thing in the morning to find FF's memory occupancy has ballooned overnight to more than 600MB, which on a system with only a gig of RAM is all it takes to bring the whole thing shuddering to a halt.

And I mean shuddering. As in, it can take several minutes to redraw a window, move from one tab to another, read an email, or launch another app. Until today I thought the only fix was to restart the browser, and even this takes an age. Several minutes for the main browser window to disappear and the process will still hang around in the task list for 10-15 minutes before it releases all that memory. Finding myself at a loose end this afternoon I did a bit more research and discovered RAMBack: an add-on that forces the release of memory.

What a difference! With Task Manager running I can see FF's occupancy plummet when I minimise it from around 200MB (its apparent resting state with my standard eight tabs newly opened) to only 17MB. True, this figure then climbs rapidly back up to ~100MB as the active content of those 8 tabs (Facebook, Google Reader and various other widgets) gradually grabs the resources back, but at least I can now force it to dump its heap and allow the rest of my system to behave normally. It remains to be seen what state it'll be in tomorrow morning, but for now the sludge has been replaced with the slick.