It was a hypothetical scenario based on a combination of past experiences. Right now Firefox shows 464M resident (RES column in top) with five tabs open (wait, it's growing, now it's 480M, 486...). After a couple of hours it will be close to 1GB resident.
I've been working on large images in Gimp and Hugin/panotools in the past, and reached a point where swap was being used. The system immediately slowed to an unusable crawl with only a few % of swap in use. Considering that rotating hard drives have a random access throughput of a few MB/s, it's not surprising. These days a swap partition's only use is hibernating. Swap is effectively useless.
One webapp I'm working on triggered a bug in older versions of Chrome that caused it to grow rapidly in size, quickly consuming all of memory. Fortunately that was fixed.
So basically, I'd like to have another GB of image data in RAM before hitting swap (or whatever it is I'm working on), while still having my browser responsive.
I've had Firefox (versions 3 onwards) running for weeks at a time and only ever had it using between 400-500MB of RAM.
Another thing to check would be what kind of ad ons you had installed, since I would imagine that they could have quite a significant impact on memory usage and performance.
I've been working on large images in Gimp and Hugin/panotools in the past, and reached a point where swap was being used. The system immediately slowed to an unusable crawl with only a few % of swap in use. Considering that rotating hard drives have a random access throughput of a few MB/s, it's not surprising. These days a swap partition's only use is hibernating. Swap is effectively useless.
One webapp I'm working on triggered a bug in older versions of Chrome that caused it to grow rapidly in size, quickly consuming all of memory. Fortunately that was fixed.
So basically, I'd like to have another GB of image data in RAM before hitting swap (or whatever it is I'm working on), while still having my browser responsive.