How do you force Firefox to not eat all your memory?

[Amanda Yilmaz]

I'm angry.  I'm furious.  I am enraged.  I have HAD IT.

I've just had to kill my X server for the umpteenth time because Firefox
absolutely will not respect any limits on its memory consumption.  It
just keeps eating and eating, and never, absolutely never, will it
relinquish its claim on any memory once it's been allocated, even if you
close all your tabs and windows down to the very last one.  Even if you
try to limit the number of Web pages open at any one time, navigate to
the "wrong" site, and Firefox will suddenly slow your system down to the
point where you can't even navigate to a terminal or use XKill to kill
it.  The only solution is killing the X server via Ctrl-Alt-Backspace,
and even that doesn't work if the event queue is backed up to the point
where it takes a half hour for your keystrokes to get through.

Is there a way to force Firefox (and other similarly piggish
applications) into some kind of memory-allocation jail where it
absolutely cannot, under *any* circumstances, use more than a certain
amount of memory (say, 75% of the total)?  I'd rather see it crash due
to starvation than freeze the system to the point where you have to kill
the X server to escape.  There must be *some* way to do this!

With warm fuzzies (and toxic spiders) to the Firefox team,

Amanda
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists