My system hangs on multiple tabs in Firefox

[zaibatt]

My system ( CPU 2.40 GHz & 512 MB of RAM ) hangs as I open more than 50 tabs in Mozilla Firefox. I want to open approx 500 tabs at a time in Firefox browser, should, I increase its memory or CPU or both or any other idea to improve the PC performance?

[Gizmo]

Why in God's name would you want Five HUNDRED open tabs in Firefox (or even 50)?!

Anyway, if you want a lot of tabs open, you're going to HAVE to get more ram on that machine. I'd get at least 2 GB on it. Even then, sites that make heavy use of flash or javascript are going to eat a LOT of cpu time.

You'll probably want to look at a beefier CPU, and perhaps even a 64-bit OS so that you can exceed the 2GB (or 3GB with some tweaking) limitations of most 32-bit OSes.

It probably wouldn't hurt to get a second hard drive that you can dedicate to the page file as well, because with 500 open tabs I'd expect you to still have a fair amount of paging activity.

[noob]

Well I just opened 50 tabs in firefox 3.5b4, it used 80MB RAM for just the firefox.exe process

These pages were very basic HTML with a few gif images - a single tab with this page uses 38MB RAM, so another 48 used 42MB RAM. If you were wanting 500 like this I would say it would use at least 875MB RAM, I'm using a core duo e6400 and switching between tabs quickly, brought one of the cores up to 100% pretty quickly.

Now if there was flash, java, or even half decent jpg content, this would increase exponentially, let alone if there was embedded video. This would cripple the system I'm using which has 2GB RAM and a core duo e6400

I also use CachemanXP, which automatically recovers RAM being held but not used by this process.

If you are wanting to have 500 tabs opened displaying even 500 forum pages you are going to need more RAM.

If you are wanting to display streaming content, decent images, java and flash content you are going to have to up your RAM over 4GB (possibly upwards of 16GB), have a decent amout of HDD space, and a far better processor than you have. You will most definately need a 64bit OS for that.

[cloasters]

Never thought about it before. When you come right down to it, 16 Gb isn't all that much. Wonder when Tera-bytes of RAM will become fashionable?

[noob]

Well I think traditional styled RAM will disappear.
With flash based memory getting faster and more reliable, I can see using that instead. WIth an instant on, due to not losing data after power down.

[cloasters]

Did I read somewhere that Flash RAM has only a relatively few duty cycles, and it expires pretty fast?

[Daniel ~]

Originally Posted by Gizmo

Why in God's name would you want Five HUNDRED open tabs in Firefox (or even 50)?!

you have to admit that it makes a "Close all open Tabs" button look very dangerous and valuable! ":O}