this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2023
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Just curious, what were you doing with Firefox to pull anywhere near that much RAM? Right now I've got a few tabs open along with Steam/Discord/Spotify/a few terminal windows/Helvum and I'm not using 3gb for the entire system according to htop. Just curious how many tabs you have open to pull 32GB from Firefox.
it's not mainly how many but how long. I leave my desktop running for weeks, and there was a while when clearing Firefox's cache was the main reason I needed to restart. I do leave something like ~100 open at a time.
htop/top are a bit tricky because Firefox spawns a bunch of sub processes, so it's frequently an undercount; I forget whether htop accounts for that.
That's... that's too many tabs.
Think of it as transitory bookmarks. It's something like 20 tabs across 5 different windows for completely different contexts: dev pages in one desktop, work google docs in another, personal email/music/etc in another, gaming in a fourth, social media in a fifth, etc. It means I can easily context switch when I need to without having to dredge the exact things I need out of my own memory.
Fair enough, I never keep tabs open myself, but your madness has method.
I had the same problem - this extension saved my RAM: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/auto-tab-discard/