Memory (RAM) is dirt cheap these days and almost everyone has a couple of GBs. Memory Usage of applications isn’t as much of an issue as it used to be a few years ago. However, bloatwares and memory leaks are still something that no one wants to deal with. Severe cases of memory leaks can degrade system performance even if you have a lot of memory.
Firefox’s memory leak problem is well known and well documented. Thankfully recent releases of Firefox seem to have fixed these issues. However, its annoying memory leaks inspired on developer to take matters into his own hand and create a utility for taming memory hungry applications.
Minimem was originally designed to work only with Firefox, but now it works with any application. It works by automatically analysing application activity and removing as many unnecessary pages as possible. What makes Minimem stand out from other standard memory cleaners is that it gives you full control over its activities. Minimem displays all currently active processes and allows you to choose the processes you want it to optimise. Minimem works silently in the background and automatically optimises selected processes at a pre-defined interval (by default 30s).
Minimem looks really ugly but it does work. During my testing shaved off more than 100MB from Firefox’s memory usage. However, keep in mind that there is no point in being miserly with your RAM. If you have 4GBs of RAM then let applications take full advantage of it. Don’t cringe if an application starts utilising a few hundred MBs of RAM. Artificially reducing RAM usage in such cases can have an adverse impact on performance. However, if you don’t have gigs of RAM to spare then Minimem can really come in handy. Alternatively you can also try using MemoryCleaner if you don’t want to selectively optimise processes.
Download Minimem (399 KB)
Platforms Supported : Windows All
License : Freeware
Version Reviewed : 1.3
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