Nowadays modern computers comes with high memory, from 1GB to 4GB and some even up to 8GB! Although powerful computers with high memory theoretically can multitask a lot of software together, but let us say if you load a firewall, an antivirus, Firefox browser, Nero Burning ROM, Adobe PDF Reader and a few more resource hungry software, you will feel that Windows starts to perform very slowly even if you still have a lot of free memory. Some of the symptoms are clicking the start menu and it is slow to appear, Windows Explorer takes a while to load and etc. That’s the reason why I don’t turn on the antivirus real-time file scanner even if I have 2GB of memory.

One of the biggest problem is using Firefox. I use it everyday and the hungry Firefox monster really eats up a lot of memory after using it to browse the web for a period of time. From the image below, it shows that it takes up 126MB but there were times that it can go up to 200+MB.

I know that there’s the “Ultimate Firefox Optimizer” which can reduce the memory usage from hundreds of megabytes (MB) to a few hundred kilobytes (KB). It is amazing but I’ve never used it nor posted it on this website because it doesn’t have an official website which makes it unreliable. Scanning it on Virustotal (36 antivirus) and 13 antivirus detects it as adware. Even Kaspersky’s Virus Analyst Vyacheslav Zakorzhevsky confirms that it is an adware.

Here’s an even better solution on how to reduce the memory usage for any running programs.


Minimem is a memory optimization solution to run modern applications on not-so-modern computers. Initially developed for Firefox only, Minimem now can reduce the memory footprint of any application. It runs in the background and can be set up to optimize as many processes as you’d like, using a very intuitive graphical interface. Unlike other memory optimization tools, it gives you full control over what applications you want to optimize, when and how often.

It optimizes memory by removing as many non-necessary memory pages as possible from the selected processes. It does so at regular intervals which can be user-defined as well and every 30s by default. This then optimizes your applications which can load those pages back whenever they need, and makes your overall system perform much better whenever it is memory limited.

Minimem remembers all of your settings; it is hence recommended to define once your processes to optimize and memory reduction period if you’d like to not use the default one, and then set Minimem to auto-start with your system. Its use will then become transparent to you and it will just do its job silently. Applications that are best to optimize for memory are typically office applications, typically word processors, and web browsers. On that last front Minimem has been tested to be extremely efficient with Firefox, the application it was originally designed for. Minimem does not replace your task manager and you should use this task manager if you’d like to analyse how much memory your various processes take; just press Ctrl-Shift-Esc to open it.

Yay! Minimem reduced Firefox’s memory usage to 12MB and it does that every 30 seconds! The best part is I can select a few more running application to automatically optimize the memory usage.

[ Download Minimem ]