Privatefirewall and Firefox question!

I recently switched from OA premo to Pf, namely because new Sandboxed (Sandboxie), Ff browsing sessions would not load homepage MSN for 15+ seconds on an XP desktop. It is a well documented issue! Now with Pf, sessions start in about six seconds. However, I've noticed that memory usage now is going over 100,000kbs shile browsing, where previously it rarely surpassed 60/70 range. I've not installed any new extensions. Could this possibly have anything to do with Pf? Thank you!

 

My answer will really not help you. I use Win 7 64 bit.

I can tell you that I tried to duplicate the problem with Win 7 and I have no problems. MSN homepage loads instantly, in about or less than 1 second. I have no increased memory usage. PrivateFirewall seems to be working fine. I also have Firefox sandboxed with Sandboxie. I am using a beta version of Firefox called Minefield ver 4.0b8 which is much faster than the official FF version.

This may help your problem. If you want to check out the beta of FF go here: ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/nightly/latest-mozilla-central/ and look for a file called: firefox-4.0b8pre.en-US.win32.installer.exe ( all plugins and extensions may not be compatible with your current version)

It may help some, but I suspect your problem does not lie with Firefox. Hopefully someone with XP will try to duplicate this with Sandboxie and PrivateFirewall and give you a better answer.

 

Yeh, I'll give it a go in my vm. Presume you're running 3.6.12 version of Firefox? How about Avast - it's in your signature?

 

Just tried it with PFW, SBIE, FF 3.6.1.2. Firefox started up and opened MSN page in 4 seconds (and this is in a slow VM). Memory usage for Firefox starts at 53,000k and carries on rising depending on the number of tabs open. I can easily push it to 130,000k, but it drops again back down to c.70,000k. Shutting down PFW has no impact on Firefox memory usage. Personally I don't think you have any problems with Firefox or PFW.

 

I'm one of those that switched from OA Premium to PFW a couple of weeks back due to excessive CPU usage by oasrv.exe (~50% for long periods). Still have about 6 months left on the license.

PFW, Sandboxie and Firefox work very well together on my XP Pro SP3 setup.

Currently Firefox is about 114K but it fluctuates quite a bit. (This is the high end of the range.)

I can't remember the last time my fans were so quiet and my setup ran as smoothly as it is currently.

I do miss some of the features I gave up with OA (Run Safer, Banking Mode, etc) but things are just much more satisfactory this way.

 

Thank you for all the input! Sounds like there is no connection between the two. It now is a moot point as I've rescheduled CleanMem to run every ten minutes as opposed to 30, thus Ff mem usage has no chance to run out of control.

 

Does that program really work? I have one app that seems to have a memory leak and that really increases quite a bit from day to day.

What's the current thinking on CleanMem for an XP setup?

(Thanks in advance and sorry for the slight sidetrack.)

 

Why miss it? "RunSafer" action can easily be had by using DropMyRights -- see also over yonder.

Emphatically YES! CleanMem (CM) uses a Windows API to do the cleaning -- effective, lightning fast, will NOT adversely affect any process. From CM's website . . .

 

Thanks!

I had downloaded DropMyRights some time back (just in case my time with OA or Sandboxie ever had to come to an end). I use the "drop rights" setting within Sandboxie on internet facing apps (and a few others).

I decided to give CleanMem a shot and I'm pleasantly surprised to say that it actually worked on a program that I have which increases its memory usage exponentially unless the system is rebooted. (It usually starts out about 9,000K and will end up over 100,000K within a few days.)

I'll look into DropMyRights if I need to enhance my current setup.

Thanks again.