Oh no, firefox started hogging on memory since a few years back, when they started releasing new versions like stupid. I used to have 300+ tabs open, configured to not load them at startup only at access, and still the memory was hogged.
It’s possible the problem is caused by an extension or a combination of extensions, because even reducing the tab to as low as 20, it didn’t make much difference (I think the memory usage was about 600 MB ram and 600 MB swap, going up as I kept working.
So whenever I hit the upper memory limit of about 3GB/process , since I’m on x32, FF starts acting out, various stuff stop working, but usually that is clear (gmail won’t open the attachment file browsing dialog, new windows start begin black background and not load some html elements, and even some UI elements (buttons and such), and so on. Also the CPU usage spikes reaching 50%+, so one core is completely eaten up.
Basically I need to teach myself to interpret the blue empty screen as reaching the upper memory limit. Usually, if I don’t do anything the browser just crashes by itself at some point, so I rather restart it myself.
Anyway, ranting aside, the issue is not caused by the host client :)