Yesterday Firefox was reporting 66GB RAM usage on my MBP with 16MB RAM. I also have a Linux VM that must be permanently running
Firefox became unresponsive until it decided to shrink its caches, which it did over about 5 minutes down to 10GB usage.
It clearly didn't need 66GB, most of it swap space. Usually it's not that much, and is more likely reach 20-30GB.
Firefox on Mac seems to grow and grow and grow usage, then when it becomes unresponsive it shrinks usage until it's responsive again. Several times a minute when scrolling sometimes, a long pause. It shrinks down to 10GB or less consistently. (My guess is a bug in the internal heuristics governing how much it decides to cache, being confused by MacOS memory compression and/or the fast swap.)
Perhaps I'd have a better browsing experience with 64GB RAM than 16GB. And less SSD wear. Perhaps less battery consumption, depending on whether SSD I/O for swap consumes more or less than powering extra DRAM.
Firefox became unresponsive until it decided to shrink its caches, which it did over about 5 minutes down to 10GB usage.
It clearly didn't need 66GB, most of it swap space. Usually it's not that much, and is more likely reach 20-30GB.
Firefox on Mac seems to grow and grow and grow usage, then when it becomes unresponsive it shrinks usage until it's responsive again. Several times a minute when scrolling sometimes, a long pause. It shrinks down to 10GB or less consistently. (My guess is a bug in the internal heuristics governing how much it decides to cache, being confused by MacOS memory compression and/or the fast swap.)
Perhaps I'd have a better browsing experience with 64GB RAM than 16GB. And less SSD wear. Perhaps less battery consumption, depending on whether SSD I/O for swap consumes more or less than powering extra DRAM.