A good way to improve start-up and some other bookmarks and history related tasks is to defragment and trim unused space from these databases. But, since there are no managing processes checking and optimizing the database, these factors eventually result in a performance hit. SQLite databases become fragmented over time and empty spaces appear all around. Warning: This procedure may damage the databases in such a way that sessions are not saved properly.įirefox keeps bookmarks, history, passwords in SQLite databases. To disable completely this feature, change _from_crash to false.ĭefragment the profile's SQLite databases To increase the save interval to 10 minutes (600000 milliseconds) for example, change in about:config the setting of to 600000

The default setting is to save the session every 15 seconds, resulting in frequent disk access. It is used to recover a previous session in case of crash.

Longer interval between session information recordįirefox stores the current session status (opened urls, cookies, history and form data) to the disk on a regular basis. Open about:cache to verify the new disk cache location. To do this, go to about:config and set _directory to /run/user/ UID/firefox, where UID is your user's ID which can be obtained by running id -u. The cache will now be preserved between Firefox runs (including Firefox crash recovery), but will be discarded upon reboot (including OS crash). The settings need to be configured for each user individuallyĪn alternative is to move the 'disk' cache to a RAM disk, giving you a solution in between the two above.The content of currently browsed webpages is lost if the browser crashes or after a reboot, this can be avoided using anything-sync-daemon or any similar periodically-syncing script so that cache gets copied over to the drive on a regular basis.The following formula very closely approximates this table, and can be used to set the Firefox cache more dynamically: 41297 - (41606 / (1 + ((RAM / 1.16) ^ 0.75))), where RAM is in GB and the result is in KB. The 'automatic' size selection is based on a decade-old table that only contains settings for systems at or below 8GB of system memory.Add the entry and set it to the amount of KB you want to spare, or to -1 for automatic cache size selection (skipping this step has the same effect as setting the value to -1).Verify that is set to true, more information about this option can be found in the Mozilla article.The Firefox cache is divided into memory and disk cache and the latter results in frequent disk writes: newly loaded objects are written to memory and older objects are removed.Īn alternative approach is to use about:config settings: This is because of very short object expiration time, updates or simply user behavior (loading new pages instead of returning to the ones already visited). It is estimated that only a fraction of these objects will be reused, usually about 30%. Turn off the disk cacheĮvery object loaded (html page, jpeg image, css stylesheet, gif banner) is saved in the Firefox cache for future use without the need to download it again.

If it is disabled on your hardware, forcing hardware rendering is not recommended. Warning: WebRender hardware rendering is disabled on many GPUs and drivers due to critical issues with stability, rendering output and performance. If you are experiencing rendering issues with up-to-date drivers on your machine, you can force-enable Software Webrender by setting the preference to true in about:config. If your system does not meet these requirements it will fallback to software rendering using Software Webrender. As of Firefox 93, it is enabled by default for all users and uses hardware rendering by default if the hardware it is running on supports at least OpenGL 3.0 or OpenGL ES 3.0 (as of 2021-04) and meets minimum driver requirements. It is the compositor that powers Firefox and the Servo browser engine project. WebRender is a high-performance, GPU-accelerated 2D rendering engine written in Rust. $ ps -e | grep 'Web Content' 13991 tty1 00:00:04 Web Content In this case the Content process limit for the current user has been increased to 4: However you may want to manually adjust this setting to increase performance even further or decrease memory usage on low-end devices. Īdjusting these settings can be done in Preferences or by changing the value to 1-8 and to false manually in about:config. For additional information see these MozillaZine articles.įirefox automatically uses settings based on the computer's hardware specifications. This section contains advanced Firefox options for performance tweaking. Note: Listed options may only be available for the latest version of Firefox.

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