Firefox Plumber Eliminates Memory Leaks
If you’re a power user like me, you’ll find Firefox will often balloon to about 1 gig of RAM usage after some time. Often times it’ll hit that point and then just crash.
I’m probably in the minority but my surfing habits tend to be open a mess of tabs and then come back and read later. I never go back to bookmarks (even though I do have a delicious account and actually tag stuff). At any time, I may 25-100 tabs open in my browser.
I’ve had to install add-ons like session manager just to ensure I don’t lose my tabs when working because Firefox’s built-in tools wouldn’t restore my tab session when it crashed.
I recently stumbled upon Firefox Plumber (http://www.rizone3.com/2011/firefox-plumber/). I’ve been testing it for a few days now and I have to say I’m completely blown away by how well the utility works.
Currently I have 32 tabs open in Firefox. Under normal loads, the browser would utilize between 800MB-1GB of memory. With Firefox Plumber running, which is only utilizing about 708k in memory usage, Firefox is currently fluctuating between 4 and 7 MB of memory usage.
The only caveat is that Firefox Plumber does utilize about ~5% of the CPU to keep Firefox tamed.
After some sleuthing, I found it accomplishes this by offloading the memory to the swap file which could present it’s own issues. I’m going to stick with it for now since Firefox appears to be more stable and see how things work.
Secrets, oh my
It amazes me sometimes the lengths that companies go to “protect” their products but then make so simple to work around.
I am trying to get a program called NeatReceipts to work on my machine and am running into serious issues with it because of a crappy installer. It keeps failing when installing the database. Of course it tries to be slick and install in a password protected instance with a hidden password.
Naturally as a tech, I’m inclined to fix problems on my own PC. So I’m poking around to figure out exactly what’s happening and why it is failing. There’s no real information as to why it fails. It doesn’t even notify me that there’s been a failure, it actually tells me it’s successful.
So I’m tracing all the steps backwards and trying to figure out how to get the SQL instance setup. Of course there’s no information on this anywhere. So I do further sleuthing and stumble across log files created by the installer in another folder with this in plaintext:
Executing sqlexpr32.exe -q INSTANCENAME=NR2007 SECURITYMODE=SQL SAPWD=nr-2006-s@pwd-t6r5y7n9y7t6y7 ADDLOCAL=SQL_Engine,SQL_Data_Files SQLAUTOSTART=0 REBOOT=ReallySuppress /qn
Now it just makes me wonder, if you’re going to be all paranoid and choose a password that is really that complex and unguessable, why store it in a plain text where anyone with brains could see it?
It reminds me of the time when Quickbooks wouldn’t help my company unlock the SQL database when we were looking to integrate another product. The actual response we got back from them regarding the password was “Guess.”
Not very smart when you have a team of intelligent geeks who’s primary job is figuring out how stuff works. We didn’t waste time figuring out the password though. Instead we used a backdoor solution of backing up the database and restoring it which gave us full access to the entire DB.