My system hangs on multiple tabs in Firefox

[zaibatt]

My system ( CPU 2.40 GHz & 512 MB of RAM ) hangs as I open more than 50 tabs in Mozilla Firefox. I want to open approx 500 tabs at a time in Firefox browser, should, I increase its memory or CPU or both or any other idea to improve the PC performance? :confused:

[Olle P]

Why on Earth do you want to have 500 tabs running? :eek:

To me 50 is plenty, and of course what's probably grinding your computer down is the limited RAM and quite possibly also the browser cache size.

The first thing you could do is to up the cache size. In Firefox it's under
Tools - Settings - Advanced - Network - Off line storage.
Set that value to some 300 MB.

Then add 2GB of RAM to your computer.

Cheers
Olle

[RagingShadow07]

Yeah... I'm asking the same thing as Olle, here... Going for a record or something?

Anyways, RAM is the way to go. Firefox with 3 tabs open uses about 200MB RAM for me... with 500 open... Er... yeah...

Just make sure those windows aren't all Youtube or streaming video windows. Then, you'd probably need a processor upgrade.

[Olin Coles]

You need to use a 64-bit Operating System, which will allow you to have a higher memory capacity beyond 4GB. I think 12GB of RAM is a good start for this many tabs.

[RagingShadow07]

Great... now I want to try this... Is there a way to see how many tabs you have open in Firefox? Like, a counter? Counting 500 tabs could take a while.

Edit: By the way, for those of you using Firefox 3.5... have you had any problems where it won't close tabs when you click close? It's happened to me 3 times now...

[Olin Coles]

There's no tab counter available... and 500, or even 50 for that matter, is rediculous. I'm waiting for the op to come back and edit his post with a spam link. Just seems too suspicious, especially for a first post.

[RagingShadow07]

I ended up holding CTRL+T for a while. I probably had 60 blank tabs open. Out of 4GB, it started as 43%, and went up to 44% use, which isn't bad.

What do you mean by editing a post with a spam link? I've seen you mention it before, but I'm not really sure what you mean.

[Olin Coles]

A popular trend with spammers is that they make an innocent post with no links, and then once it's under the radar they come back and edit their post to include spam links. This way it doesn't show up as a new post, and mods usually don't catch it. The real problem is that vBulletin doesn't allow you to turn off links in the post; only in the signature.

[RagingShadow07]

Ah, the system doesn't treat an edit as a new 'post'? Pretty sneaky tactic. It's pretty surprising at the amount of spam threads I've seen (before they get deleted) here.

Out of curiosity, do you ban people who spam, like those who post the spam threads in every forum within an hour? A couple of times I swear I've seen the same user do it more than once. I may have gotten them mixed up, though.

[Remacno]

Great... now I want to try this... Is there a way to see how many tabs you have open in Firefox? Like, a counter? Counting 500 tabs could take a while.

Edit: By the way, for those of you using Firefox 3.5... have you had any problems where it won't close tabs when you click close? It's happened to me 3 times now...

To answer your question...yes! I have had issues closing them. Also, when I close the browser and within the same 5 minutes, try to open the browser back up, I always have to open the task manager and shut down a firefox process that stays running long after the browser is closed. Also, the process keeps building up usage and once it hits about 300 KB, the program will freeze, lag, delay, or become unresponsive.

[RagingShadow07]

300KB? As in Kilobyte? Or did you mean 300MB? On average, Firefox always uses an upwards of 60MB (for me, anyways).

For anyone having problems with FF3.5, and want to go back to FF3.0.11, here's a link. (http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/products/download.html?product=firefox-3.0.11&os=win&lang=en-US) (It's a direct link to download the file from Mozilla's website, so when you click, it'll immediately prompt a download.)