[Discuss] memory managmeent

[richb at pioneer.ci.net (Rich Braun)]

Matthew Gillen <me at mattgillen.net> wrote:
> If I try
> to run Firefox, and a few java apps (e.g., Eclipse), my machine thrashes
> about and effectively locks up because of out-of-memory issues.

I finally evicted Firefox from my life about 3 years ago over this. I open too
many tabs, mainly because nobody's invented a browser that provides a
convenient way for me to keep track of and instantly scroll through pages that
I look at frequently.  (At the  moment, my Tabs Outliner plugin shows I have
57 open tabs.) So I have 2 or 3 monitors with tons of pages at my fingertips.

The workplace Mac I'm using at the moment is 8GB, and the Linux desktop at
home is 16GB. 4GB hasn't really been quite enough for me the past couple years
but should be plenty for up to maybe 30 or 40 open browser pages--in Chrome. 
Forget about it in Firefox, which has too many memory and CPU-leak problems
for me to put up with anymore.

Those java apps are also pretty memory-intensive: it sounds like you'll
benefit from taking another look at Chrome, and will probably want to upgrade
RAM. On older motherboards, the latter probably will force a system overhaul,
which these days I have to do about once every 5 years (new
motherboard/cpu/RAM combo, for maybe $400 though you might be able to do it
for half that if your budget's tight).

-rich