Batch file

[Donald Talbert]

On Wed, 2011-06-29 at 11:05 -0500, Bill Stanley wrote:
> A friend of mine has a bad habit of opening too many instances of the firefox 
> browser.   I've told her that it is unnecessary to create a new instance when it 
> is easier and faster to just create a new tab.  She tries to open a tab instead 
> and likes it.  The problem is that it is an ingrained habit with her and she 
> reverts back to opening a new instance instead of opening a new tab.  As a 
> result, she often runs short on memory and the computer slows down when forced 
> to use swap memory.  (Her computer is a mid-aged laptop with the RAM maxed out 
> to 2 GBytes.)
> 
> That is the background.  A possible solution is to replace the launcher for 
> Firefox with a batch file (or script) which will launch Firefox after checking 
> if the Firefox program is running.  I envision a batch file (or script) that 
> would run ps to check if it firefox is a running process.  If it is a running 
> process, the batch file would ask if she really wants another instance of 
> firefox.  It seems like an easy thing to do.  (I often created old DOS batch 
> files and these should be very similar to Linux batch files (or scripts).  Any 
> ideas about better ways of doing this or suggestions on how to implement this?
> 


That's not going to work really, Firefox only starts 1 process even if
more than 1 window is open. Even if it did start more than 1 instance
Linux shared libraries would share ram usage. Heres how your fix your
ram issue, the easy way. Changing your firefox settings instead.

In the address bar type: about:config
goto browser.cache.disk.capacity and set between 20000 to 50000
goto browser.cache.disk.smart_size_cached_value and set to above value.

Also read these:
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Memory_Leak
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.cache.memory.capacity
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.cache.memory.enable
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers

-- 
Donald Talbert <donaldtalbert at gmail.com>